Crimes Against Logic

Rating:
Summary: Faith in Logic
Review: As a senior citizen I found it refreshing to see there are still some younger people out there who believe that there is such a thing as truth, and that logic is the true path to finding it.

Jamie Whyte has written this very entertaining book in his crusade to unmask the humbug often presented by politicians, journalists, priests and his parents in their versions of the truth. He does this by effectively exposing the logical flaws in what people believe to be rational thinking.

In his chapter "Prejudice in Fancy Dress" he uses the example of how priests deal with the doctrine of the unity of the holy trinity. How can three things equal one? The answer is explained as being a mystery. This of course is simply a ploy to abolish the problem without addressing it, and effectively avoids facing the absurdity of the statement. He acknowledges that some people are greatly impressed by mystery. It "gives them a thrilling fit of the cosmic heebie-jeebies".

In another section, he illustrates how verbosity can shroud the banality of ideas, and claims that playing with words is much easier than tackling reality. He makes this statement without any apparent sense of irony, in that he is using his words to attack a reality that, as he grows older, he will have to acknowledge does not exist - that the human animal is a logical creature.

He observes that authority figures or celebrities are often treated as experts in fields in which they know nothing about, and that victims of crime are often given more weight by politicians in assessing changes to criminal law, than those who have given a lifetime of study to the subject.

In his discussion of the misuse of statistics, his example of the promiscuity of British women when on holiday in Spain is a very amusing example of sampling selection bias.

To enjoy this book, it does help to ignore the reality of human nature and assume that people really should behave logically. I believed this myself once upon a time, but eventually lost the faith. Even if you don't believe humans should be logical, this book is a lot of fun.

Regretfully, Jamie Whyte is on a Don Quixote quest. Human behavior is governed by emotions and self interest, not logic. Even Star Trek's Mr. Spock acknowledges that humans are illogical. Unfortunately in the end, faith in logic is really just another form of religion, but it is a better occupation of the mind than counting the angels on the head of a pin.

Rating:
Summary: Damn Funny Stuff
Review: For once, the product description is on the mark: this brief book really is a "fast-paced and ruthlessly funny romp" through the boundless wasteland of shoddy thinking. I laughed aloud about a dozen times while reading it. Whyte draws his comical examples of confused reasoning from his own eccentric family, from political speeches and parliamentary debates, from advertisements and newspaper editorials, and from conversations with investment bankers. He's a born raconteur and a natural writer, for sure, but he isn't just trying to entertain you. His pungently witty anecdotes contain deftly delivered and fairly sophisticated philosophical points. Whyte's a clever tutor and his lessons are likely to stick in your memory.

Rating:
Summary: Read it and give it to everyone you know
Review: This book deserves the widest possible exposure in America, especially so close to the election, because it an excellent primer on how to guard yourself against the faulty reasoning that governs so much modern political discourse - and avoid adopting it yourself. I first heard about the book because one of its points was mentioned in an essay. The point was basically that just because someone has a motive to hold a certain position doesn't necessarily mean that the position is false. This seemed pretty obvious, but as I turned to the media I was amazed at how often politicians use this method, and how easily I had accepted their claims if they lined up with my political preferences.

Any damaging report against either side, for example, would frequently be denounced as a "partisan" attack, with occasional documentation of how the person who presented the report was tied to one party or another, as if this were the issue at hand. No attempt was made to address whether the report was true or not, the assumption being that exposing a bias - a motive for the potentially false information - was conclusive evidence.

Some of the things Whyte discussed in the book - for example, sample bias in statistics - are going to be familiar to many people, but just as frequently he comes up with something that all of us have probably used in an argument. For example, in the chapter "begging the question," he quotes a common pro-choice argument: "If you believe abortion is wrong, that's fine, don't abort your pregnancies. But show tolerance toward others who don't share your beliefs."

He points out that this ignores that actual position of anti-abortionists, that abortion is murder, morally equivalent to killing a live human being. The argument for tolerance takes for granted that the fetus is not really a person, and that therefore it should be possible for everyone to only be concerned with their own behavior. But as Whyte points out, anyone that actually wishes to confront the issue will have to address the question of whether the fetus is a human being. So many pleas for tolerance between certain feuding religions, he points out, have the same problem, because they skirt the genuine issue that is giving rise to the outrage - that, by the tenets of some religions, only one of them can be true.

I suspect Whyte's positions on religion will offend the most readers. He has no sympathy for familiar arguments about the un-knowable nature of god, or that the intricacy of life on earth necessarily implies a god (already taken apart by Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion); he also presents a simple and conclusive refutation of Pascal's gambit that I've never come across before. Luckily, he does not exhibit the most annoying characteristic of many rationalists, smugness; instead, he seems to have a deep desire to get at truth, which I think we are more in need of today than any amount of vague piety.

The book will only take a couple of days to read, and is very clearly written. I remember an article that dealt with similar material that I read in high school, forgotten now because it ended up as an exercise in memorizing the Latin names of various fallacies. Whyte is conscientious about calling things by their common names. Buy the book, give it to your friends, and try to get at the bottom of why you believe what you do (and whether you still should).

Rating:
Summary: Lucid and Funny
Review: This is a perfect book for getting people interested in logic. It is short, lucid, and quite witty, full of quirky but relevant examples from everyday life. Many of the fallacies Whyte describes will be familiar to students of logic, but several of them are quite original and spot-on. I definitely learned a few things from Whyte's little book and had an enjoyable time doing it.