Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Rating:
Summary: Pseudoscience: the secular religion
Review: According to Terrence Hines, "The continued claims by proponents of pseudoscience constitute nothing short of consumer fraud," a fraud that costs the American public billions of dollars each year. In debunking the most widely believed contrary-to-fact beliefs, he devotes several pages to explaining how cold readings are accomplished in sufficient detail to satisfy all but the incurably giullible that the psychic scam relies on the Barnum dictum that there is a sucker born every minute. He shows that passages by Nostrodamus widely interpreted as foretelling the rise and fall of Napoleon could equally well be applied to Ferdinand II, Adolf Hitler, or any European ruler whose governance was less than beneficial. He also shows that a novel retroactively interpreted as a prediction of the sinking of the Titanic conformed to all of the circumstances that a book about an ocean liner sinking was virtually obliged to incorporate in order to be plausible.
Hines' chapter on psychoanalysis should be mandatory reading for all persons who still believe Sigmund Freud's imbecilic fantasy differs in any qualitative way from spilling one's guts to a bartender, taxi driver or hetaera, particularly TV scriptwriters who regularly portray psychoshrinks as something other than self-deluded humbugs.
Hines catalogues an abundance of evidence that polygraphs are no more effective as lie detectors than tossing a coin, "Heads it's the truth and tails it's a lie." He described an experiment conducted by "Sixty Minutes," in which polygraph operators from several firms were asked to determine which CBS employee was responsible for a series of thefts. Each operator was given a hint that a particular individual was the prime suspect. In fact there had been no theft, and each operator was pointed toward a different suspect -- and without exception each identified the individual touted to him alone as the guilty party. After such exposure on the world's most watched news magazine program, how in the name of science can polygraphs continue to be mistaken for "lie detectors" (there is no such thing) by law enforcement agencies and other unteachables? The answer is that believers in the validity of polygraphs are as impervious to falsifying evidence as believers in the other nonsense beliefs Hines falsifies.

Rating:
Summary: The Gift of Rational Thinking
Review: As a medical writer who has become more and more interested in alternative medicine, being able to think clearly and evaluate rationally has been one of my greatest strengths. I owe much of this to Dr. Hines, who deftly explains why so much pseudoscience is plain old junk, while keeping an open mind about things that are still under investigation. He even manages to do this in an interesting, amusing, and entertaining way.

People really want to believe in the paranormal, and rarely want to have their beliefs challenged with rational explanations. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? But the truth is the truth, and sometimes, when Dr. Hines tells it, it's even better than the fiction.

Most people think that having an open mind means being receptive to strange and "unbelievable" things. I think that having an open mind means being receptive to all possibilities -- including those that indicate that some unbelievable things really shouldn't BE believed. If you consider yourself an rational thinker, take the time to read this book, and give it to others as a truly magical gift -- the gift of reason.