Robert Carroll, “Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

Robert Carroll, “Unnatural Acts:  Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed! [Kindle Edition]”, James Randi Educational Foundation (2011) 320 pp.

I suspect the author sought a catchy title and “Unnatural Acts” seemed to fit the bill.  I mean: Is critical thinking really that unnatural?  Sadly, the author supports his title and convincingly asserts that nothing conflicts with our natural inclinations more than critical thinking.

Unnatural Acts is for people who want to improve their thinking, become more accurate in their beliefs and more reasonable in their actions.  This book is about natural and unnatural thinking, and how the way we think affects everything we do. Natural thinking is instinctive, intuitive, quick and dirty. It works pretty well most of the time, but it can get us into trouble in the modern world.  Natural thinking was developed when we inhabited the savannah and physical preservation was the motivating fear. In the modern world, by contrast, you can reduce the chances of being duped by learning how to think in unnatural ways.

My Notes:

Loc 76:  It wasn’t that long ago that the generally accepted opinion among most people, including most educated people, was that the mind is independent of the brain and the body.

Loc 89:  The Earth is hurtling through space in orbit around the Sun while rotating at a high rate of speed, on its axis Earth’s circumference at the equator is 24,901 miles.  If you are standing at the equator then you are moving more than 1,000 mph relative to the center of the planet.  The planet is also orbiting the Sun with a velocity of about 67,062 mph.  (None of this is intuitive).

Loc 137:  Today, the generally accepted opinion among most neuroscientists is that the mind is the brain in action and the human brain is the result of millions of years of evolution.  Critical thinking is something the evolved human animal does.  Nature has driven us to think in ways that benefit our chances of survival and reproduction.  These ways of thinking may not lead us to care much about the truth. 

Loc 206:  Harmful effects of alternative treatments include that patients can be misled by unscientific healers to imagine they are suffering from nonexistent disorders (e.g., allergies and poisoning from ‘toxins’ such as mercury in dental amalgams) and then provided treatments for their imaginary problems.

Loc 241:  Today, we accept it as fact that the best we can hope for in most of the things that matter is some degree of reasonable probability (not certainty) that what we believe is true.  However, we will not teach alchemy alongside chemistry, numerology alongside algebra, nor astrology alongside astronomy.  Nor should we teach creationism alongside cosmology or evolutionary biology.

Loc 319:  Most of us don’t know how to evaluate odds properly, so we think things couldn’t possibly be coincidental when they are.  We see patterns where there are none. 

Loc 444:  Critical thinking is thinking that is clear, accurate, knowledgeable, reflective, and fair in evaluating the reasonableness of accepting or rejecting a belief or taking an action.

Loc 637:  The brain is not a digital video/audio recorder, replacing its input with updates every millisecond.  The healthy brain filters out most of the potential sensory input available to it.  This filtering is essential to perceiving anything clearly, but it means that for everything we see or hear there is a lot more that we could have seen or heard but didn’t.

Loc 735:  The evidence is overwhelming that hypnosis leads people to remember things that never happened.  People are often very confident in their erroneous hypnotic memories, probably because they ae so vivid and easy to come by under hypnosis.  The evidence, however, does not support the notion that the more confident one is in the accuracy of one’s memory the more accurate the memory is likely to be.  For example, in a study of wrongful convictions overturned, 73 percent had been based on eyewitness testimony. (Loc 762).

Loc 769: Our brains are primarily driven to process data to preserve us and make us feel comfortable, secure, and pleasant, and only secondarily to find the truth.  We all tend to be uncritical of data that support our beliefs and very critical of unsupportive data (confirmation bias).

Loc 858:  Fear of the unknown has driven human beliefs and actions for as far back as we can reconstruct the history of human consciousness.  Uncertainty drives this fear and has led us to thousands of superstitions and irrational actions.  The human brain is a story generator and the human being is a story lover.  We have been making up stories for thousands of years and passing them on from generation to generation. There are stories of spirit serpents, etc…

Loc 872:  Religions are collections of stories and rituals that bind groups of people together.  They are vats of magical thinking from which communities get their sustenance.  Occasionally one of the stories is actually correct.  Many stories, like those about the afterlife, were protected by the shield of being impossible to test.  Then science arrived and it became possible to verify or falsify many of the old stories.  But a century after Darwin, more people accept as fact such things as spirit communication than accept the fact of evolution.

Loc 1014:  President Ronald Reagan, the hero of the anti-liberal establishment, increased taxes and government spending by 68% in his first six years in office (1980-1986), while doing very little to stop the growth of government regulation and bureaucracy.  The US government spent $591 billion in 1980.  It spent $990 billion in 1986.  The deficit rose from $60 billion in 1980 to $220 billion in 1986, while the national “conservative” George W. Bush, the national debt rose to about $9 trillion. There was no deficit when President Clinton left office and George W. Bush took over. 

Loc 1435:  The metaphors of the Coach and the Team Player are misplaced when the desired outcome is good decision-making for the company, the school, or the country.

Loc 1606:  The Bush administration tried to manage the news by distributing prepackaged ready-to-serve news reports to TV stations, a tactic long-used by corporations and special interest groups.  The State Department, for example, produced a video news release (VNR) featuring a euphoric Iraqi-American in Kansas City thanking Bush and the USA for invading Iraq.  Another VNR featured a fake reporter covering airport safety.  According to the New York Times, at least twenty federal agencies produced VNR propaganda pieces under the Bush administration.  Each VNR clearly supported one of the administration’s policy objectives.  (The Clinton administration also produced VNRs, but the Bush people turned it into an art form).

Loc 1852:  In 1982, fifty corporations owned almost all of the major media outlets in the United States. Five years later, ownership of all these media outlets had shrunk to twenty-nine corporations.  By 1999, nine corporations owned the lot.

Loc 1873:  From 1993 to 1998 the homicide rate nationwide dropped by 20 percent but in the same period, ABC, CBS, and NBC coverage of murders increased by 721 percent.

Addenda:

Biographical Information
Robert T. Carroll, Ph.D.

Author was a full-time teacher in the philosophy department at Sacramento City College from 1977 until retirement in 2007. He taught a variety of classes, including Logic & Critical Reasoning; Law, Justice, & Punishment; Critical Thinking about the Paranormal; Introduction to Philosophy; History of Modern Philosophy; and World Religions. He also taught courses in Ethics, Symbolic Logic, and Philosophy of Religion.