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How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age
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Description
This brief, inexpensive topic helps the reader to believe critically, utilizing examples from the weird claims and beliefs this abound in our culture to demonstrate the sound evaluation of any claim. The authors focus on types of logical arguments and proofs, making How to Believe concerning Weird Things a flexible supplement for logic, critical thinking, philosophy of technology, or any other technology appreciation courses.

Customer Reviews
Customer rating is 5 of 5  A Commanding Examination of Rational Thinking   2009-09-23
By TW
One cannot avoid thinking, sidestep decision making, nor elude the bombardment of poor logic and irrationality so abundant in society. It makes perfect sense to learn to become as clear a thinker and decision maker as possible. Schick and Vaughn, in their Critical Thinking masterpiece "How to Think About Weird Things" dive head first into the fundaments of rational thought, the aspects of human nature that produce irrationality, and the means to think as productively as possible. Ripe with examples from absurd lines of thinking to common complex fallacies, the book covers all pertinent aspects of critical thinking.

Put best in their own words on page 2, the authors state:

"You hear a lot of `whats', but seldom any good `whys'. You hear the beliefs, but seldom any solid reasons behind them - nothing substantial enough to indicate that these assertions are likely to be true. You may hear naiveté, passionate advocacy, fierce denunciation, one-sided sifting of evidence, defense of the party line, leaps of faith, jumps to false conclusions, plunges into wishful thinking, and courageous stands on the shaky ground of subjective certainty. But the good reasons are missing. Without good `whys', our beliefs are simply arbitrary, with no more claim to knowledge than the random choice of a playing card. Without good `whys' to guide us, our beliefs lose their value in a world where beliefs are already a dime a dozen."

While this thinking may not resonate with everyone, the reality is that it should. If society as a whole shifted to more rational thought and a consistent standard of scrutiny among all beliefs, there would be a lot less friction on this planet and a lot more level headed views. How to Think About Weird Things offers a comprehensive overview of rational thinking aimed at causing such a positive shift, and thus I recommend this book to any serious thinker.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  One of the best books on logic for the layperson   2009-09-04
By Douglas Wallace (Austin, TX)
This book is a excellent introduction to logical fallacies and helps to clear up common misconceptions of what we think we know. For instance, the "scientific method" is widely presented as to be some sort of rigidly cast method of getting past the Inquisitors of Big Science, or some simple 3 step process of observe, hypothesize, and test, or even the commonly believed one that one false result will always toss a theory into the trash. The authors explain how science really works, and that the scientific method has many ways of working, but it has to have supporting methods.

My favorite is the definition of a "testable" hypothesis. The authors contend that a hypothesis that does not predict more than the single phenomenon it was designed to predict, is not testable, and probably useless. This is quite strange to some people at first, but becomes clear by a very useful and illustratively absurd example of gremlins and fluorescent lighting. The proposal that good theories have qualities of "scope" and "fruitfulness", in addition to just being predictive and useful are very insightful.

The sections on logical fallacies is well written, without the usual academic resort to Latin phraseology, so some reviewers have called it "sloppy", an unfair criticism as it is not a textbook, but a guide for laypersons. It is not "dumbed-down", though, and requires active reader participation. Very satisfying reading.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  Good book   2008-02-29
By Shirley D. Mented (Los Angeles)
I honestly thought this book was amazing. Obviously there's a lot of opinion in it, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's definitely provided me with a lot insight.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  Excellent book on critical thinking   2008-02-13
By Oscar Bonilla (Menlo Park, CA USA)
Not only is this book really informative, it's also entertaining. It goes through most of the 'weird' stories that you have probably heard. Stories like the monster of loch ness, bigfoot, near-death experiences, mediums, haunted houses, etc. And it analyzes each of these claims with a framework built on top of logic and the scientific method.

The authors do a pretty good job of giving each of these issues a fair treatment. E.g. they don't claim that UFOs are non-existant, or impossible to exist. They just claim that for the set of phenomena reported as UFOs, there are other, simpler, explanations.

Somewhere in the book it says "The more a theory contradicts your existing beliefs, the more suspicious you should be of it" (paraphrasing). What I'm driving at is that if you have a lot of beliefs about weird things, like ESP, etc. you will find a lot of the things in this book hard to swallow. If you're already a skeptic you'll be nodding your head a lot.

However, if you believe in something and are trying to convince someone else to believe it too, the tools in this book are probably the only ones that will accomplish the deed.
Customer rating is 5 of 5  This book is changing my mind   2008-01-03
By shawnnews (Rockford, IL)
Reading the first edition of this book this summer was the start of a mental revolution for me. This book can turn your beliefs on their head in a friendly way. I was able to smile at the fact that I could be wrong in how I interpret events.


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