Wednesday, March 30, 2011

SHM Book Club #005 - Why People Believe in Weird Things by Michael Shermer

Month of March saw the SHM Book Club reading "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer, a book about all the weird things people believe in like UFO, ESP, Ghost, Witches, Pseudoscience, Pseudo-history, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time.

The book club was host by Doug, who kept us pretty distracted with a half finish jigsaw right in the middle of his living room. But luckily, we did managed to proceed to discuss about the book briefly before breaking for tea. 

The chapter on "How Thinking Goes Wrong: 25 Fallacies That Lead Us To Believe Weird Thing" is well worth reading.You can read all the 25 Fallacies here.


For those of you who missed the book club, you can still benefit from it by reading the book on your own, read the 25 fallacies, or watched the youtube clips below:
 


Just a recap of what was discussed
  • Why people believe in weird things instead of resorting to other explanation
  • Why some people want to believe in certain things
  • Probability, coincidences, statistics and the error of only counting the hits and not the misses

SHM Book Club will be having a joint meetup session with the Hungry Hundred Book Club for April's reading title "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Do login to Singapore Humanism Meetup Group to RSVP before all spots are taken up! Note: prior reading before each session is required.

The coordinator would like to thank Doug for hosting the March's book club, and the wonderful people who helped somewhat with his jigsaw puzzle: JF, Nel (Thanks for the photo for this blog entry!), Susan, Balach, Tawnya and Sher.

Book Recommendation from this meetup:
The Trouble With Testosterone by Robert M. Sapolski
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

Some side topics discussed during the session:
Angler Fish Mating
Transhumanism
Cryonics
Chimera

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