Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

Notes

1. I’ve known about this book since it first came out and resisted buying it as I imagined it’d be preaching to the choir as far as I’m concerned.
2. However, in May 2024 it was going dirt cheap second hand and was mentioned in "Cassam (Quassim) - Bad thinkers", so I’ve bought it ‘for reference purposes’.
3. It has mostly positive reviews on Amazon, but some – probably in part correctly – allege that it’s a collection of rants against people Shermer disagrees with and rejects anything current science cannot explain.
4. Another Amazon reviewer (clearly something of a crank, though a well-educated one. Wikipedia: Mike Sutton (criminologist)) takes the opportunity to advertise his own book by accusing Shermer himself of believing weird things by not accepting his arguments that Darwin and Wallace knew that they’d been scooped by an earlier author. See Wikipedia: Patrick Matthew.
5. I’ve not read the book yet, but these reviews and a quick look at the TOC raise some interesting points in my mind.
   1. It doesn’t seem ‘weird’ to reject – even out of hand – the views of a revisionist outlier. It may eventually prove that the researcher was correct, but given the number of ‘revisionist outliers’, we don’t have time to consider them all. So, Mike Sutton’s complaint against Shermer is just silly.
   2. Some of the views Shermer has as ‘weird’ would commonly be thought of as such: Alien abduction, witch hunts, holocaust denial, paranormal activity. Others less clearly so (read on …). Modern ‘witch hunts’ are a matter of political opinion. I’ve a feeling that hounding certain divisive political figures for relatively minor misdemeanours (which they naturally deny) and which are popularly described as ‘witch hunts’ may really be so (though the meaning of the expression in such cases bears no real relationship to its earlier usage).
   3. There are questions to be answered for NDEs: they certainly exist, it’s what they signify that matters.
   4. I don’t know much about Ayn Rand but imagine her ideas – and those of her supporters – are rather more obnoxious to left-leaners than strictly ‘weird’.
   5. Belief in a flat Earth is weird, but I don’t think belief in Biblical Creationism – however misguided – falls into that category. The same goes for ‘Intelligent Design’. There are difficult questions to do with fine-tuning. It’s not a ‘weird’ belief to think there must be a divine knob-twiddler when it comes to the various constants.
   6. I thought it highly tendentious to include what looks like a critique of ‘Race Theory’ and the supposed racial variability of IQ in the Part dealing with holocaust denial. Views in this area – if held by researchers qualified to speak – are not ‘weird’ merely because they are not commonly fashionable (they were common sense until quite recently). It’s an empirical question whether there are differences (though there are methodological difficulties). The main question is whether these differences are environmental or genetic and what – if anything – can be done about them.
   7. So, some of the Amazon reviewers complaints may be sound.