Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Wonderful, funny, true September 7, 2008
I love this book and go back to it again and again.
I suppose religious readers may find his atheism troubling.
Personally I have my doubts that logical thinking is compatible with religious faith, so I was not too perturbed that a book on the former should disapprove of the latter.
 A quick witty read December 30, 2007
It's witty and well written. It is not a rulebook for logics, or even anything close. It doesn't try to be either. What it gives you are some simple ways of spotting the most common fallacies in logic as they present themselves in media and even worse when they are uttered by friends who we all know - should know better. It's not a toolbox either - you won't learn to pick the arguements to counter your friends follies, but you will spot them. It leaves alot of work to you - but then... at 150 pages, what do you expect? - I would recommend it to any teenager planning on a career in politics or media.
Very insightful and entertaining, but with many substantive errors August 31, 2007
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
I agree entirely with another review that said this is entertaining and insightful, but with sadly many mistakes. While agreeing with everyone elses quoted mistakes, I thought I would add to the catalogue.
Homeopathic dilutions. The general statement that Whyte makes that homeopathic dilutions can be so dilute they are extremely unlikely to contain even a single molecule of the solute, is correct, but the specific example he gives is arithmetically wrong. In an X20 solution, 1cc of solution would contain 10 to 100 molecules of the solute, if we take the solute to have a molecular weight of 60 to 600g/mol, a plausible range for a nature-derived chemical. Although for a macro-molecule like a protein, with much larger molecular weight over 6000g/mol, then there would be on average fewer than one left in 1cc. 1cc is a small quantity; if we are interested in proving none left in larger quantities, then rather larger dilutions are required.
The Trinity. Whyte argues that the Trinitarian Christians' doctrine that God is Three and God is One must be false, by appealing, it appears, to axiomatic set theory. I think it is actually just a pedant's joke. I think Trinitarians are guilty of no more than Humpty-Dumpty-speak ("a word means what I say it means"). There are plausible alternative interpretations of what Trinitarians mean when they say that, which are consistent with axiomatic set theory, and reflect more closely what they actually mean. In other words, Whyte is forcing on them a kind of "contractual interpretation" of their metaphorical words to impose upon them a belief they don't in fact have. A classic straw man argument that he so deplores.
Popper and the falsity of God. Whyte wrongly implies that the Popperian notion of a theory takes the position that an untestable theory is a false theory. (Popper coined the horrible word "unfalsifiable" instead of "untestable", a bad PR move; but, along with many I prefer to use the synonym "untestable", whose meaning is clear.) Whyte goes on to argue that since the existence of God (provided one says little more than that) is an untestable theory, it must be wrong. This is a misunderstanding of what Popper said, as well as being logically wrong - and Popper was nothing if not logically rigorous. Indeed I agree with Popper himself that the Popperian notion of a theory is not so much a philosophy as a logical necessity. Sadly, it is not uncommon for professional philosophers to misunderstand what Popper meant here, probably because many professional philosophers lack sufficient understanding of science. What Popper actually says is that an untestable theory is (a) vacuous, since it makes no prediction, so in a scientific sense we don't need it - - and (b) not a theory at all, rather a belief, tautologically, since it is untestable. In other words, all Popper tells us is that belief in a God is religion not science, which I think we already knew. That is why "creation scientists" get up real scientists' noses so much. Richard Dawkins is much better on this. He distinguishes carefully between deist and theist notions of religion, deism being the vacuous belief "there is a god, he created the universe and its laws" and no more; whereas theism (additional beliefs such as those in the bible/koran) adds a lot of magical baggage which typically becomes testable and hence inconsistent with science. Dawkins understands perfectly that the deist position is logically unimpeachable, and restricts his arguments to theists who believe a lot more. Compare this with the situation in Axiomatic Set Theory, the basic axioms of mathematics, (which Whyte implicitly uses). The Axioms are (tautologically) untestable. But it doesn't mean that these axioms are "false". If that were so, we would get a contradiction from using them, and we don't. We can even pick and choose which axioms we like, as with different geometries using different axioms.
 A mostly entertaining read, but not without its own bad thoughts June 1, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a nice little introduction to logical thought, which is in itself none too taxing. After reading it, you'll be spotting logical mistakes in no time. However, as noted by a previous reviewer, Whyte does go on about religion quite a bit, which to my mind is the weakest aspect of the book.
The main problem is that he never really goes very indepth (which would have been interesting), preferring instead to take pot-shots, and then move quickly on. His assertion that there can't be an all-powerful God if evil exists is particularly poor, presented as it is without any sort of discussion about what "all-powerful" means (many if not most Theists do not believe God to be "all-powerful" in the way Whyte suggests), or what "evil" means. Instead, he blithely states that people who believe this have been "convinced by one of the many bogus theological attempts to show this belief consistent with the existence of evil", and then pretty much leaves it there. This, and Whtye's other attacks on religion are generally straw man arguments, and so are bad form for a book on logical fallacies. Admittedly, the book is short, and so it would be hard to give a detailed examination of the religious themes, but this is the very reason the book would have been stronger without them; if when writing a book on logical fallacies you can't mention something without it sounding like a logical fallacy, you should probably not mention it at all.
Still, Whyte is frequently humorous, and he does write in a lively, engaging style. If you don't mind putting up with Whyte's personal religious opinions being presented as gospel (pun intended), I'd recommended this book as a good starting point, with the proviso that those interested will progress to something a bit more substantial.
 Badly thought out August 31, 2006
54 out of 85 found this review helpful
My main problem with this book was that so many of the arguments were badly thought out; A serious deficiency in a book that proclaims itself to be "A Guide to Clear Thinking." For example, Jamie Whyte claims that the seemingly excessive profits made by a bank are nothing of the sort as they represent only a 15% return on investment for share holders. What he fails to consider is that returns on share holdings, or yield, tends to be limited by the market, because when profits start to rise significantly the share price will also rise, bringing the return on investment back to around the same level. A far better indicator of excessive profits is to look at them in regard to the company's turnover, something the book fails to do. Mr Whyte also uses almost the whole chapter on coincidence to dismiss the anthropic principal (although he doesn't name it) on the seeming reasonable grounds that (to paraphrase) "there had to something and it's just a luck accident that it tuned out to be us". What he totally fails to understand (or at least mention) is that the anthropic principal is about the universe being fantastically fine tuned for intelligent life.
The author uses a good part of the book to attack or support what appear to be his favorite subjects. Top amongst these is his dislike of religion, which he dismisses contemptuously in almost every chapter. The trouble is that he is so contemptuous of religion that he fails to make even a single sustainable argument prior to dismissing it. His argument that an all good God could not allow evil to exist is particularly poor and would not have won a debate in a sixth form society. He repeatedly supports the freedom of a person user to use addictive drugs, both legal and illegal, on the grounds that the pleasure they derived is an important part of the equation. This is good, but he fails to factor in that an addictive drug limits a user's freedom to stop taking the drug if they feel that the pleasure is no longer sufficient.
One chapter of this book attempts to show that people are not really entitled to their opinion. I agree, provided you meet someone with more facts, better ideas or a keener insight to show you a better way. In this book, Mr Whyte appears to think he has better ideas and a keener insight. I was sadly unconvinced that he does and I keep my opinions unchanged by his book.
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