Ironically done-in by the trappings he himself describes
2 stars
False is a difficult book to summarize. The world could use quite a bit more content like the majority of its contents. It does well to include many factors involved in how we are faulty thinkers and susceptible to poor reasoning leading to false beliefs. The author takes care to include all of us in the potential victims of our own biases, which a reminder we can never have enough of.
However, when Pierre chooses to shift from psychiatric topics to politics, racial and social justice, and philosophy, he finds himself quickly out of his depth. These chapters serve as something of a public forum for his seeming unaware internal conflict between his deep centrist leanings with his informed understanding of the existence of racial injustice and far-right extremism in the United States.
His apparent need to sit neatly in the middle and suggest that the most healthy …
False is a difficult book to summarize. The world could use quite a bit more content like the majority of its contents. It does well to include many factors involved in how we are faulty thinkers and susceptible to poor reasoning leading to false beliefs. The author takes care to include all of us in the potential victims of our own biases, which a reminder we can never have enough of.
However, when Pierre chooses to shift from psychiatric topics to politics, racial and social justice, and philosophy, he finds himself quickly out of his depth. These chapters serve as something of a public forum for his seeming unaware internal conflict between his deep centrist leanings with his informed understanding of the existence of racial injustice and far-right extremism in the United States.
His apparent need to sit neatly in the middle and suggest that the most healthy approach is one that includes "compromise" on issues such as "racial equality" and "abortion". Framing being "pro-choice" and "pro-life" as "contested ideologies". He exposes himself and his own biases in describing an archetype of a man who is "middle of the road", endorses "conservative economic stances" and "free-market capitalism", "believes in the right to bear arms" and "isn't particularly politically active" as someone who reaches this position as an example of a "mentally healthy way of believing".
Pierre also appears to not understand the concept of moral relativism while trying to use it as an example. At least, I hope he doesn't understand it. Because under the proper understanding of moral relativism -- that what is acceptable is contextual to facts involved when making the decision to act -- what is written excuses pedophilia and slavery.
Ultimately he appears to abandon the importance of being factually correct once it dips into politics, seemingly, though unspoken, by the belief that if people can get along more nicely, then we'd stop having extremists.
The last major flaw in the writings on politics is that it barely acknowledge the media ecosystem driving extremism on the right. Factors in faulty reasoning like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning don't really come into play when it someone is simply internalizing what they're told from authority figures because they are conditioned to do so.
Most of the book provides useful, interesting facts on how we think and come to conclusions. When Pierre tries to pull these points together into a sort of worldview of how politics should look like in America, it comes across naive, uninformed, and frankly, what you would expect from a well-off middle-aged White guy. And as such, I can't really recommend this book.