The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science By Will Storr
It was not until the chapter during which Storr describes attending the exact same Austin, Texas conference of Morgellons sufferers that Leslie Jamison describes in a chapter of The Empathy Exams - and quotes the same/similar overheard conversations - that I grasped what this book was actually achieving: The Unpersuadables is a series of empathy exams absent the high-minded literary experiments or the self-regard Jamison required to explore the capacity. And Storr passes every exam. He doesn't ridicule creationists, religious believers, homeopathy adherents, UFO theorists, radical skeptics, rogue scientists, or Holocaust deniers (although he easily could have). He attempts to understand them and why they believe what they do in an involved manner that thereby challenges his own unbelief, squeamishness, and kneejerk emotional responses.
In the early chapters I had flickerings of impatience when I feared that I was reading a 300+ book that was going to survey a lot of things I'd read about before (creationists, alternative medicine, skeptics, etc.). But unlike many other more impersonal, obstinately objective works this book improves as it progresses. The investigations accumulate and feed back into each other and further Storr's personal journey of understanding, until the three excellent portraits of David Irving, Rupert Sheldrake, and James Randi. The embattled Harvard researcher John Mack also plays a bizarre recurring role.
The book ends with one of those au courant indictments/take-downs of free will that make my head hurt to consider but leave me strangely relieved and optimistic. It was likely true what his father accused of him after Storr's first book, Heretics: that he didn't understand faith. But at least he's trying. Or at least that's the story as Storr has crafted it, which, you'll see if you read this, is also one of the points. Will Storr In my mind Will Storr is the brilliant love-child of Mary Roach and Louis Theroux, both of whom I adore. I think Will may have to join their lofty heights in my respectability/adoration mind shrine.
Will's Will Storr vs the Supernatural was a wonderful and random find that I made several years ago. Will took it upon himself, Louis Theroux style, to get immersed in the lore and activity of the supernatural. What was different about the other supernatural books is that Will approached it from a skeptical point of view. His conclusions were that most of what he investigated was utter bullshit, but there were a few instances that made him think. That book was much better than Mary Roach's approach taken in her book Spook.
Anyway, this time Will has taken on the enemies of science. Well more like the enemies of reason. SO each chapter or two is dedicated to an interview or an activity with a fringe group or person. You start with a creationist preacher, move through to holocaust deniers and take on homeopathy. All sections are well-researched and Will approaches each instance with a sympathetic ear. That ear may not last long, but he does have the best of intentions.
All throughout Will is bringing this all back to the nature of belief and the apparent need for the human brain to make reliable sense of the world it exists in. So there is a greater message other than Look at these dickheads and a great attempt to try and understand human thought processes.
In it's own way I think that this book adds it's own to a religion vs. science argument and should be considered essential reading for anyone tackling this subject. It definitely should be as popular and as read as Dawkins' The God Delusion and makes a much more logical assay of belief than Hitchens' God is Not Great. It had a die-hard atheist like myself thinking as opposed to going right on! to every point. Very strong 4 stars. Will Storr Not a debunker book as I originally expected. Storr not only meets with intelligent people who believe in non-scientific ideas (Holocaust deniers, young-earthers, past life explorers, etc.), he investigates recent studies in psychology and neuroscience to learn why people will ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary to passionately pursue such outsider lifestyles. His discoveries point out, not so much how different they are, but how alike we all are in the way we construct our versions of the world. Fascinating read. Will Storr This was an interesting read but I feel like Mr Storr might have bitten off a bit more than he can chew. Ostensibly a book about 'why people believe things which are clearly crazy', this tome bounces from false memories, to confirmation bias, to psychosomatic illnesses, to holocaust deniers, to hearing voices, to homeopathy.... he seems to be trying to answer the question 'how do people formulate ideas' and that, in my opinion, is just too broad for any single person to answer.
Storr is brilliant at painting portraits and telling stories. He's not so good at formulating coherent arguments, especially on a topic as vast and daunting as this one. So the book is quite inconclusive. There were no WOW moments for me, in which I felt I learned something new*. Each chapter tended to focus on a different person or group - James Randi, Lord Monckton, people with morgellons, etc. For the most part, they were people that I'd already heard about in the popular press. Granted, Storr managed to create a new and engaging slant on them, but all of the 'cases' he covers were already very well known.
I didn't enjoy this as much as Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts, as I didn't think it was as original. However, I'd definitely still read another of his books.
*This isn't 100% true. I did find out that chicken sexing is done through intuition:
Will Storr Not the most festive of books but bloody gripping all the same, this is Storr’s attempts to understand why people believe the things they do, even if the world tells them they’re wrong. Storr meets religious leaders, hardcore sceptics and bunch of quirky characters inbetween and even delves into the neuroscience. (Realising how untrustworthy your own beliefs are is a little unnerving.) It’s the sort of book you’ll feel the need to share fascinating facts from at regular intervals. — Rachel Weber
from The Best Books We Read In December: http://bookriot.com/2015/12/23/riot-r... Will Storr
Will Storr was in the tropical north of Australia, excavating fossils with a celebrity creationist, when he asked himself a simple question. Why don't facts work? Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them?
It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world--from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides--meeting an extraordinary cast of modern heretics whom he tries his best to understand. He goes on a tour of Holocaust sites with David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis; experiences his own murder during past-life regression hypnosis; discusses the looming One World Government with iconic climate skeptic Lord Monckton; and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult.
Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism, and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological hero maker inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship, and science denial. The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
This is a fascinating work of investigative journalism. The author, Will Storr, examines a range of beliefs that are antithetical to science, history, and even common sense. He interviews people who have these strange beliefs, and digs in deep. He tries to understand why people have these beliefs, their motivations, their way of thinking. Storr sometimes mentions the contradictions between these crazy ideas and reality--and listens carefully as these people rationalize their beliefs.
Storr interviews creationist John Mackay, UFO believers Glennys Mackay and Kay McCullock--and psychiatrist Professor John Mack, who tries to understand the psychology of why people believe in UFO's and alien abductions. Storr joins an enormous yoga session led by swami Ramdev, and later interviews him and his assistants. Ramdev claims to be able to cure just about any disease, including cancer (but not AIDS). Storr interviews past-life regression counselors, and takes a radical ten-day Buddhist mediation course that turns out to be psychologically painful. He interviews people who are convinced that homeopathy works, and he interviews skeptics who turn out to be just as closed-minded as the so-called quacks. He interviews a climate-change denier and a holocaust denier.
Then, Storr interviews people who complain of painful symptoms of a disease named Morgellons. The medical establishment dismisses this disease as non-existent, that is to say, it is in the minds of the sufferers. However, there is strong evidence that it is a real syndrome caused by very small mites that dig into one's skin. But the medical establishment believes that the sufferers are delusional, and seem to reject the possibility of a real, physical cause.
Storr describes some fascinating interviews with schizophrenics, and he interviews psychiatrists who try to treat them--some using conventional medicine, and others using unconventional approaches. In some cases, there is evidence that schizophrenia can be triggered by traumatic events--but this idea is very controversial. Storr interviews a number of scientists, trying to understand how people acquire these strange ideas. He investigates how much of our political preferences are due to nature and how much are due to our environment.
There is a very confusing chapter, centered around a woman who committed suicide. She surely suffered from some mental illness. But there are strong suspicions that certain therapists pushed her into mental aberrations, by inducing memories of abuse by satanic cults--memories of events that probably never occurred. Storr goes into detail, trying to understand how memories of non-existent events can be induced.
This book is also a very personal memoir. Will Storr brings up his own history, and tries to understand his own beliefs--how he came by them, and how he sometimes suffers from delusions that are just as confounding as the subjects of his interviews. The book is entertaining, engaging, and gives a wonderful insight into the field of investigative reporting. I highly recommend it! Will Storr I don't understand this, Christianity is a monothesist religion but sound more like a dualism with two supremely opposed Gods each with their own realm in the hereafter:
When God says something's wrong, the Devil's out to do anything to convince us it's right.
But if you follow that logic, any thought we have that goes against the Bible is the Devil. So we're not allowed to think for ourselves.
We are allowed to think for ourselves. Your first step is thinking that God's wiser than me so I will accept what he says, even if I don't understand it.
So that's all the thinking for yourself you're allowed. The decision to believe everything God says.
Yes.
It also sounds like more or less all religions. Will Storr At the beginning of this book the author sets out a simple concept in a way that hadn’t previously occurred to me. It’s self-evident that each of us thinks our opinions are correct, but none of us will ever encounter another person who agrees with us 100%. It follows that either an individual considers themselves the cleverest person in the world, or each of us accepts that some of our opinions are wrong. It’s in this spirit that the author seeks to find out more about those who hold unconventional opinions, and why.
Will Storr grew up in a religious household and rebelled against this, something which left him antagonistic towards religion in general and Christianity in particular. He is open though, in also admitting he had mental health issues as a young man, including kleptomania, alcohol and drug addictions, and excessive feelings of jealously around his romantic partners. As he says himself, this may have given him an instinctive sympathy for those who are accused of acting or thinking irrationally.
The book devotes roughly a chapter apiece to the various beliefs featured, which include “Young-Earth” creationists, “ufologists”, believers in reincarnation, ESP, homeopathy, and others. One chapter features the “Hearing Voices Network”, whose members dispute the concept of schizophrenia. Another has an interview with climate-change sceptic Viscount Monckton, who holds some very fringe opinions across a range of issues. The author is fair to those he interviews and in some cases sympathises with their viewpoints. There are a few exceptions though. One chapter features medical professionals who promoted the “satanic panic” of the 80s and 90s. Without him saying so directly, you get the impression Storr concludes that those involved leant credibility to the allegations of delusional individuals, to the great harm of many innocent people around them. Late on in the book he goes on a tour of Holocaust sites organised by David Irving. The rest of the people on the trip can only be described as Nazi sympathisers.
In some ways though Storr is more critical of the “skeptic” community (he advises that even the British ones have adopted the American spelling) as he argues they are as unwilling to change their opinions as those they condemn. The last chapter has an interview with James Randi, who of course died in October – the book was published a few years ago. Storr portrays Randi in an unflattering light.
Personally, I’m a big fan of science and technology, and I lean towards a rationalist interpretation of the world. Despite that I quite enjoyed this book. It was a reminder that, however firmly we hold our opinions, we should not be arrogant towards the beliefs of others (at least, not very often). The author spends time examining things like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and “confabulation” as explanations of how people hold to beliefs in spite of evidence against them. One aspect of the book, which the author acknowledges, is that he barely addresses the issue of people who do change their minds, and how that comes about.
I’d be the first to say that in 95% of arguments, a qualified expert has a more accurate view than a layperson, but there are enough examples of experts being proven wrong to demonstrate that it’s vital that people continue to challenge established opinion.
Will Storr A book about cognitive biases leading people astray wherein the author is led astray by his own cognitive biases.
To back up, the author of this book spends his time interviewing various eccentric characters, including famous creationists who think the world is literally 6,000 years old, swammis who believe deep meditation can cure any ailment (well, except for AIDS), Hitler enthusiasts who think that the Holocaust was made up (or at least grossly exaggerated), climate change deniers and famous skeptics and debunkers. A less skilled author would treat the eccentrics like a sideshow exhibit, and merely conclude that they're either deluded or stupid, but Storr generally treats them with civility and shows them as intelligent (sometimes very intelligent) individuals that are misguided in the same way we're all miguided. This, in the beginning, is a real treat - the care which Storr takes with his subjects and his entertaining writing seem to promise some deep revelation about what makes people in general unpersuadable when it comes to their firmly held beliefs. It's a real shame when those revelations come to nothing.
All of these interviews are in service of providing extreme examples of cognitive biases that lead all of us astray. These include confirmation bias, wherein we come to a conclusion emotionally and look for evidence that supports it while reasoning away any evidence that doesn't. The most interesting example of this is the famous Hitler enthusiast who goes through impressive mental contortions to reason away any document or fact that shows that Hitler knew of the concentration camps and what was happening in them.
The problems creep in as it becomes more and more clear that Storr wants the homeopaths and alleged alien abductees to be right, for there to be magic in the world, despite the evidence. He even states this at one point in the book, but having acknowledged this as a mental trap he's still unable to avoid it. As the chapters go on, Storr shows the least sympathy for the skeptics, those Goliaths that are fighting his chosen Davids.
Early on, he makes the point, succinctly and enjoyably, that skeptics suffer the same cognitive biases as those they debunk, but then goes well past that. An entire chapter is devoted to trying to show that James Randi, a famous skeptic and debunker of those claiming to have paranormal powers, is a liar and generally an asshole. The efforts Storr goes to in that chapter to catch Randi in a lie just left me feeling bad for Randi, an 80 year old man (who probably is a bit of an ass).
Once he's done taking down crackpots and skeptics alike, Storr simply throws his hands in the air and declares truth is relative and we can never know if we're just deceiving ourselves. But this misses a big piece of the puzzle, makes the book feel incomplete and robs it of an interesting conclusion. The missing piece is an exploration of how we get things right.
If we're all just coming to an emotional decision and then reasoning to support that or in a way that makes us the hero, how have we built a civilization? Why don't we still drill holes in peoples' heads to cure mental illness or use radium suppositories to cure hemorrhoids? The answer is the scientific method - a process that demands rigorous testing and experimentation rather than hunches. Storr acknowledges this in a passage or two, but largely ignores it, preferring to paint a picture of the human race that has us grubbing around in the dark forever. Randi may be an ass and skeptics may be susceptible to the same cognitive biases as Holocaust deniers, but the application of the scientific method by skeptics will lead to the right answer (eventually) more often than not. The reason Storr avoids this discussion seems to be his own biases in favour of finding for the crackpots and coming to the conclusion that truth is relative or that we can never really be sure we've got it right.
Why 3 stars then? Because the book is interesting, it is well written and it did have me second guessing some of my reactions and assumptions. Ultimately though, Storr is a storyteller and not a scientist, so what you're left with is a book of stories rather than revelations. Will Storr This was a fascinating read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It wasn't what I expected going in. Instead of just being tales of wacky people with wacky beliefs, it was really an examination of why we believe what we do, sometimes even in the face of contrary facts. It's a reminder that none of us are ever entirely free of bias. Will Storr
