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| Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Shermer
Creator: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00 (40.02 RON)
Buy New: $11.56 (27.21 RON)
You Save: $5.44 (12.81 RON) (32%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  159 reviews
Sales Rank: 6462
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0805070893
Dewey Decimal Number: 133
EAN: 9780805070897
ASIN: 0805070893
Publication Date: September 1, 2002
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Reccommended for anyone interested in reason and skepticism. July 25, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you believe that reason, rationality, and skepticism are the best ways to arrive at a conclusion for any subject, then read this book. If you're conspricacy theory prone, a believer in the paranormal, or believe things first and figure out why later, then you REALLY need to read this book.
An important, well-written book July 23, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I think some reviewers of this book are critical of it because it isn't the book they expected-- or the book they would have preferred. There are two reasons for this.
First, it's not a formal academic study, though it is academically rigorous. Michael Shermer does NOT offer a deep psychological or sociological analysis of why people believe weird things, and he absolutely does not suggest that those people are stupid, insane, or evil; in fact, he repeatedly asserts that the people who believe weird things are generally thoughtful but misguided. This book is not a rant, and I think some reviewers wanted it to be one.
The second problem that some reviewers have is, I think, caused by the title. The book doesn't directly explain why people believe weird things; rather, it examines a number of weird things that people believe, then it examines various ways peoples' thinking can go wrong to produce weird beliefs. This indirect approach puzzled me at first, but by the time I finished the book, I understood what Shermer had done and why.
The strength of this book is Shermer's display of reasoning skills to defend the importance of reasoning itself. He defends and celebrates the scientific method by presenting his thesis, examining the data, and deriving the only reasonable conclusions possible, all the while being careful to emphasize that the scientific method requires him to accept the possibility that the weird believers might be correct and he might be mistaken. Shermer is a very bright, articulate, experienced, and educated person, so it would have been easy for him to demolish the weird believers with ridicule. He deliberately does not do so, because, after all, he is defending REASON.
It sounds so simple, but it's not. One of Shermer's gifts is the ability to disagree in a civil way. That's a rare skill indeed in today's in-your-face, scorched-earth style of debating public issues.
In the culture wars, Shermer is a pacifist, but he's most certainly not a non-combatant. This book is his smart bomb. It will richly reward the effort reading it requires. I recommend it highly.
 A Surprisingly Poor Book July 22, 2007
6 out of 31 found this review helpful
The title of this book is clever, but the book itself is a curious, undisciplined mixture of a wide variety of experiences and phenomena that are not related at all - except in that the author thinks they are weird. This sort of subjective bias is certainly no basis for a supposedly serious book.
The condescension is a problem: far more serious is the absence of any research into the issues addressed. Shermer portrays himself as a debunker, a bringer of light and wisdom - but he ignores any evidence or opinion that disagrees with his militant materialism. Altogether a depressingly poor book that is essentially worthless.
A Skeptic's Manual June 12, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book by the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com). The author, a former born-again Christian who once perceived he was abducted by aliens from outer space, eventually became a skeptic.
Early in the book he introduces Hume's Maxim, named for Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Hume stated that if someone reported seeing a dead man restored to life, that person is essentially presenting two "miracles." The first is that a dead man actually became reanimated, and the second is that the reporter was either deceived or sought to deceive. Hume rejects the greater of the two miracles.
The author covers some interesting topics, including:
- medieval witch hunts
- the recovered memory movement that implanted fake memories of sex abuse
- the cult of personality that Ayn Rand erected around herself
- creationists who reject Darwin's theory of evolution
- holocaust deniers who claim the Nazis really were nice guys
The final chapter does a fine job of describing the off-the-wall beliefs of some highly educated people. I used to wonder where Art Bell finds guests for his radio show, but after reading this chapter, I realize that our universities are filled with them!
 Okay May 21, 2007
A little too complex, even for a well-read and intelligent scientific consumer.
Author and idead in the book are great.
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