Category Archives: Reading

The Power of Now

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One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.

It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s acclaimed The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment. I tried to slog through it, really I did, but there was too little psychological wheat to be salvaged from all the pseudo-scientific chaff that pervades the book.

What am I talking about? Vague references to “vibrational frequencies” that, when elevated by mindfulness, allow one to not be affected by “negativity.” Ok, I can bend over backwards and internally translate this as a metaphor of psychological states one can reach and imagery that can take one there. But then he also rails against “thought” and “mind” trapping us and being the obstacles from which we must seek liberation. I don’t buy it; it is ego and anxiety and fixation on the past and future that bind us, and careful thought can often be a liberating tool. We probably do need to take a break from being analytical all the time—but the blanket statment that rationality is an obstacle to enlightenment hardly follows from that in my book, and that is a distinctinion Tolle makes hapharzadly at best. Sloppy language, in fact, pervades the book: Tolle’s statements that past and present don’t really exist certainly are phrased to explicitly mean that physical time is illusory, but then he inconsistently backtracks from this solipsism by occasionally making reasonable distinctions between “wall” and “psychological” time.

What else? The kicker is his use of pseudoscientific jargon in ways that are clearly not meant to be taken metaphorically (or if they are, they constitute a reckless indulgence in the fallacy of equivocation): “As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense.” As a scientist, engineer, and humanist, I cannot just let that slide.

What is left after ignoring, sighing, or eye-rolling through the pseudo-science is nothing that I haven’t encountered elsewhere: One must get beyond ego. While there’s no need to be passive, one must accept what is. Wherever you are, be there. I was hoping perhaps there would be some concrete practical guides to mindfulness practice, but no. It’s just your standard breathing practice and everyday presence, and more description of what mindfulness is rather than how to get it.

I’ve found better mindfulness books that are practical, focused, and secular. Jon Kabat Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are is one; Mindfulness in Plain English is another. They seem mostly (but certainly not exclusively) focused on sitting practice, for which I struggle and fail to set aside time. I seem to be leaning more towards “everyday mindfulness,” re-focusing on the wide-eyed wonder and joy that I felt not that long ago when everyday life was (or just seemed) less hectic.

Rapt

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I recently finished reading Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher. It talks about why paying attention is good and shapes your life experience, and offers a few reminders as to how to do so. It was OK reading, though I expected it to be either more of an analysis of the state of rapt attention itself, or a book explaining how to pay attention better. It’s not quite either of those. It wasn’t a waste of time, but it certainly wasn’t as enthralling as I had hoped.

Why People Believe Weird Things

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Humanist. Agnostic. Atheist. I always stumble a bit when asked about how I view the world, generally preferring to appear matter-of-fact than antagonistic. Perhaps the best moniker to capture my desired view of the world is “skeptic.”

What makes a skeptic? An outlook on the world based on the scientific method: the accumulation of empirical evidence and the continuous testing, retesting, rejection, and modification of hypotheses in light of that evidence. Scientists are human, too, and may be led astray by their own biases and quirks, but science is a long-term progressive process aimed at pruning away these false starts and tangents and leaving a coherent, predictive interpretation on matters of fact.

More skepticism would make our society better, I believe. As readers of this blog know, one of my major irritations is the sway that pseudoscience continues to hold. I am a staunch believer in freedom of conscience, so I don’t much care, for example, if people choose to be theists. What I mind is the use of superstition as a substitute for facts and rationality in areas where it matters, like public policy. You want to believe God created the universe in seven days? Fine by me. You want to pass that off as science in the schools? Unacceptable.

It was with delight, then, that I just finished reading Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Shermer is the director of the Skeptics Society, a group dedicated precisely to debunking anti- and pseudo-scientific thinking, particularly in the public sphere (see this TED talk, for example). His book is a good analysis of the distinctions between science and pseudoscience and brief overview of some of the major battle lines in this front of the culture wars: the paranormal, near-death experiences, alien encounters, witch crazes, cults, creationism, and Holocaust denial.

In Chapter 3, Shermer talks about “how thinking goes wrong” for both scientists and lay folk alike, and how legitimate science attempts to self-correct in the face of these errors. Here’s his list, with my own annotations:

  1. Theory influences observations
  2. The observer changes the observed
  3. Equipment constructs results
  4. Anecdotes do not make a science. And yet so many people cite them as the bais for their beliefs.
  5. Scientific language does not make a science. This is a major pet peeve of mine, people invoking the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality to justify all sorts of mumbo-jumbo.
  6. Bold statements do not make claims true
  7. Heresy does not equal correctness
  8. Burden of proof [is on the outsider seeking to overturn the accepted and proven scientific paradigm]
  9. Rumors do not equal reality
  10. Unexplained is no inexplicable. This is what really gets me about so-called Intelligent Design: I can’t think of how this complex structure could possibly have evolved, therefore it couldn’t have evolved, therefore there’s a designer.
  11. Failures are rationalized. Failures advance science, but tend to be ignored in pseudoscience.
  12. After the fact reasoning. *Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”
  13. Coincidence. “Synchronicity” my ass. It’s simple probability.
  14. Representativeness. The human tendency to remember hits and ignore misses keeps psychic hotlines in business.
  15. Emotive words and false analogies
  16. Ad ignorantiam. “If you can’t disprove it, it is proven”— the complete opposite of science. Applies to God , psychics, etc.
  17. Ad hominem and tu quoque
  18. Hasty generalization
  19. Overreliance on authorities
  20. Either-or. “If your theory is wrong, then mine must be right.” Is it supported by facts? What about alternatives?
  21. Circular reasoning
  22. Reductio as absurdum and slippery slope
  23. Effort inadequacies and the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. Critical thinking requires training and work.
  24. Problem-solving inadequacies. We tend to seek supporting rather than contrary evidence for our views.
  25. Ideological immunity, or the Planck problem. As the old school dies out, new practitioners are better able to evaluate and embrace what were once revolutionary ideas.

[Shermer also has a chapter at the end on "Why smart people believe weird things," where he cites intellectual attribution bias ("my choices are rational, but your choices are swayed by irrational beliefs") and confirmation bias ("I block out contrary evidence.")]

I highly recommend this book as a skeptic’s manifesto and a reminder that we are not alone in fighting and bemoaning the ignorance around us. I will leave you with an inspirational quote from chapter 15 attributed to Alfred Kinsey (of sex research fame). This is a quote that I found a bit tangential to the points in the book, but which I like for the (perhaps unjustified) hope that with more skepticism perhaps we can make society more supportive of human dignity and differences:

Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists. What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life. The range of individual variation, in any particular case, is usually much greater than what is generally understood…. And yet social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical; and we pass judgements, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands.

Raising success

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Part of the American narrative is the story of the self-made person. Work hard, we believe, and success will follow. Some chosen few are natural geniuses and they will rise to the top effortlessly in our level, meritocratic playing field.

We know the truth is not that simple. Accidents of birth and circumstance play a large role in how a life unfolds. It is these accidental circumstances that Malcom Gladwell explores in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. His thesis is that our family, cultural, and social environments provide ever-shifting opportunities for success in a given field. These, of course, are post hoc patterns that he discerns, but his case is compelling:

  • most of the best Canadian hockey players are born in early months of the year, because they are the oldest children in the yearly selection class with a Jan. 1 cutoff;

  • many Silicon Valley titans were born in the mid-1950s, young enough to be part of the computer revolution but not old enough to miss it;

  • the perfect birth date for becoming a successful New York Jewish lawyer is 1930, because one would have belonged to a demographic trough that meant smaller class sizes, one would have had enough time excluded from the prestigious law firms to hone legal skills and grow a professional reputation in a sub-field that would become important in the 1970s, and one would have been able to observe, growing up, one’s immigrant family do meaningful work where assertiveness and extra effort were rewarded

…and so on. Natural talent and hard work matter, of course, but what is also needed are the right sets of opportunities to appear and the initiative or luck to be able to seize them.

The book would make an interesting a child-rearing manual of sorts. Not that it is particularly prescriptive, but Gladwell does identify some common traits of success: putting in enough time to become an expert in something (10,000 hours seems to be the pattern across various fields); cultivating social as well as analytic intelligence; exemplifying for one’s children meaningful work, where the reward increases in relation to the effort put forth; noting how much of the education discrepancy among social classes is due to the availability of learning opportunities in the vacation months.

I recommend this easy but thought-provoking read.

Timshel

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But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’

I just finished reading John Steinbeck‘s East of Eden. What a spectacular epic! It traces the intertwined histories of the Trask and Hamilton families and touches on issues of love, social roles, manipulation, and free choice. I need some time to digest everything, and this helpful resource (SPOILER!), with supplementary material and reminders of the main events and characters, will be quite useful.

Now I want to read some of his other books, such as The Grapes of Wrath (which didn’t grab me in high school as much as Eden did now) and Travels with Charley (which Knox recommends very highly).