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A review by cjspear
Misbelief by Dan Ariely
2.0
This book has left me unsatisfied, but I may have just expected too much.
'Misbelief' sits small in the shadow of 'Thinking Fast and Slow', a book written by the irreproachable Daniel Kahneman. 'Misbelief' is not the culmination of years of work and studies, rather it is Dan Ariely's best attempt to gather the accumulated knowledge of the past few decades of behavioral psychology to create a scientific basis for why people fall into conspiracy theories. He mentions many cognitive biases and references plenty of studies, but honestly I don't feel that I've learned too much of consequence.
The political rise of RFK Jr. has me thinking a lot about the nature of conspiracies and what motivates people to propagate them. Sidney Powell, the attorney who spread disinformation about the 2020 election and once vowed to 'release the Kraken' of information that would prove Trump won, is a good example. She never did release that Kraken. I knew she wouldn't, and she knew it too because it was a lie. We know this because her defense in court was that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” Today she pleaded guilty to this crime and will likely testify against Trump himself in the coming months. Ever since she first began doing this though I've always wondered why? She was a successful attorney who didn't need Trump's validation. Now she has thrown away her career and credibility and will be remembered as a villain of history (even worse, a foolish villain.) She never had a Kraken to release, so why did she say that she did? Why?
'Misbelief' doesn't tackle why the head honchos of conspiracy theories get the ball rolling, but merely why regular individuals believe them. I, like many others, have been left shell-shocked by the wild turn to conspiracy that so many people took in 2020 and 2021. This book just doesn't have the scope to cover the entirety of the conspiracy phenomenon.
RFK Jr, a longtime vaccine skeptic, is now running for president in 2024 as an independent. He is much smarter than Sidney Powell and doesn't propagate lies that are so easily disproved. Right before starting this book I listened to RFK Jr's 3-hour podcast with Joe Rogan and I have to admit that I can't refute most of the claims he made. He talks about things so far beyond the common man's understanding such as chemical compounds and their effects on the brain, and he cherry picks studies to support a narrative in a way that is difficult to disprove. He's pretty darn convincing too. I hoped this book might assist me in processing such information, but it didn't. Am I just supposed to assume that RFK Jr's wild claims are untrue because everyone else does? Am I supposed to go back to school and study vaccines for four years just so I can have an educated opinion on the topic? Am I supposed to trust what pharmaceutical companies like Johnson&Johnson tell me after the Sacklers profited off addicting the nation to opioids for two decades and got away with it? Why are none of these good options?
The most interesting idea I learned from 'Misbelief' is the spectrum of 'Conviction to Intellectual Honesty'. This wasn't even a full chapter, just an off-hand remark he made. To be clear, I don't believe any of these conspiracies. I believe Trump lost, vaccines are safe and effective, birds are real, and that JFK was killed by a wiggly bullet. And yet, isn't my assumption of these truths a sign of intellectual dishonesty?
Intellectual honesty is one's capability to change their mind when presented with new information. Conviction is one's firmly held principles and beliefs. The idea of the spectrum is that these two attributes are actually mutually exclusive. While both are obviously good things, we can't adhere to both all the time. There is simply too much information and data out there, enough to disprove all the beliefs we hold (if the data is manipulated properly). If we all had perfect intellectual honesty then our opinions may change on a daily basis, if not hourly. With too much conviction we'd commit to believing the Earth is flat even when our own experiments disprove that reality. We can't have a bunch of folks brimming with conviction yet scant on evidence for any of their beliefs, but we also don't want a country chock-full of spineless, milquetoast wafflers who answer every question with "I don't know, both could be true. I'm not an expert!" I think I find myself closer to the latter end. But what can I do when we live in such a subjective reality? Even so, I choose to trust the institutions that prop up society since burning them down without any plan of replacement seems like a worse option to me.
'Misbelief' ends with a chapter on trust and its importance to society. It is so much easier to sow the seeds of doubt than it is to establish a societal foundation trust. One man with a magnifying glass can poke holes in a few studies and cause hundreds of thousands to lose faith in something they don't understand. Or, a government/company can get caught lying to the public and ruin trust that way. Trust seems so fragile, yet it is the foundation that all society stands upon.
The scope of 'Misbelief' is quite narrow. This entire book should be condensed down into a single chapter of a larger book on conspiracy. I'm unsatisfied, but I just expected too much. Much like someone clinging to a conspiracy theory, I'm surrounded by uncertainty and I want someone to explain everything to me.
This review has been a little overindulgent, and for that I apologize. Thanks for reading till the end.
'Misbelief' sits small in the shadow of 'Thinking Fast and Slow', a book written by the irreproachable Daniel Kahneman. 'Misbelief' is not the culmination of years of work and studies, rather it is Dan Ariely's best attempt to gather the accumulated knowledge of the past few decades of behavioral psychology to create a scientific basis for why people fall into conspiracy theories. He mentions many cognitive biases and references plenty of studies, but honestly I don't feel that I've learned too much of consequence.
The political rise of RFK Jr. has me thinking a lot about the nature of conspiracies and what motivates people to propagate them. Sidney Powell, the attorney who spread disinformation about the 2020 election and once vowed to 'release the Kraken' of information that would prove Trump won, is a good example. She never did release that Kraken. I knew she wouldn't, and she knew it too because it was a lie. We know this because her defense in court was that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” Today she pleaded guilty to this crime and will likely testify against Trump himself in the coming months. Ever since she first began doing this though I've always wondered why? She was a successful attorney who didn't need Trump's validation. Now she has thrown away her career and credibility and will be remembered as a villain of history (even worse, a foolish villain.) She never had a Kraken to release, so why did she say that she did? Why?
'Misbelief' doesn't tackle why the head honchos of conspiracy theories get the ball rolling, but merely why regular individuals believe them. I, like many others, have been left shell-shocked by the wild turn to conspiracy that so many people took in 2020 and 2021. This book just doesn't have the scope to cover the entirety of the conspiracy phenomenon.
RFK Jr, a longtime vaccine skeptic, is now running for president in 2024 as an independent. He is much smarter than Sidney Powell and doesn't propagate lies that are so easily disproved. Right before starting this book I listened to RFK Jr's 3-hour podcast with Joe Rogan and I have to admit that I can't refute most of the claims he made. He talks about things so far beyond the common man's understanding such as chemical compounds and their effects on the brain, and he cherry picks studies to support a narrative in a way that is difficult to disprove. He's pretty darn convincing too. I hoped this book might assist me in processing such information, but it didn't. Am I just supposed to assume that RFK Jr's wild claims are untrue because everyone else does? Am I supposed to go back to school and study vaccines for four years just so I can have an educated opinion on the topic? Am I supposed to trust what pharmaceutical companies like Johnson&Johnson tell me after the Sacklers profited off addicting the nation to opioids for two decades and got away with it? Why are none of these good options?
The most interesting idea I learned from 'Misbelief' is the spectrum of 'Conviction to Intellectual Honesty'. This wasn't even a full chapter, just an off-hand remark he made. To be clear, I don't believe any of these conspiracies. I believe Trump lost, vaccines are safe and effective, birds are real, and that JFK was killed by a wiggly bullet. And yet, isn't my assumption of these truths a sign of intellectual dishonesty?
Intellectual honesty is one's capability to change their mind when presented with new information. Conviction is one's firmly held principles and beliefs. The idea of the spectrum is that these two attributes are actually mutually exclusive. While both are obviously good things, we can't adhere to both all the time. There is simply too much information and data out there, enough to disprove all the beliefs we hold (if the data is manipulated properly). If we all had perfect intellectual honesty then our opinions may change on a daily basis, if not hourly. With too much conviction we'd commit to believing the Earth is flat even when our own experiments disprove that reality. We can't have a bunch of folks brimming with conviction yet scant on evidence for any of their beliefs, but we also don't want a country chock-full of spineless, milquetoast wafflers who answer every question with "I don't know, both could be true. I'm not an expert!" I think I find myself closer to the latter end. But what can I do when we live in such a subjective reality? Even so, I choose to trust the institutions that prop up society since burning them down without any plan of replacement seems like a worse option to me.
'Misbelief' ends with a chapter on trust and its importance to society. It is so much easier to sow the seeds of doubt than it is to establish a societal foundation trust. One man with a magnifying glass can poke holes in a few studies and cause hundreds of thousands to lose faith in something they don't understand. Or, a government/company can get caught lying to the public and ruin trust that way. Trust seems so fragile, yet it is the foundation that all society stands upon.
The scope of 'Misbelief' is quite narrow. This entire book should be condensed down into a single chapter of a larger book on conspiracy. I'm unsatisfied, but I just expected too much. Much like someone clinging to a conspiracy theory, I'm surrounded by uncertainty and I want someone to explain everything to me.
This review has been a little overindulgent, and for that I apologize. Thanks for reading till the end.