3 Book Reports! From Penn's private book blog

Hello congregation members! Penn finished up a wide range of books last week and here are his write ups. Enjoy!

The Truth about Lies: the Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit – 210416 – So this publisher that I love at St Martin’s chose to not publish my book (actually my last few books), but instead sends me other people’s books that she in publishing to get a blurb and also, I guess, to show me what a good book is. Okay.  She sent this to me before it comes out (it’s like next month or something) and it’s really good. It starts out a little weak. She’s talking about magic used in cons and some of the stuff is just a little wrong. Not deeply wrong, but just a little off, like the wrong words and the wrong emphasis. She has a hunk about Teller with the Cups and Balls that’s pretty good, but the source material isn’t direct. She didn’t talk to me or Teller. After that little bit of a rocky start and using “begs the question” and “singular” in a way that really bugs and distracts me, the book becomes GREAT. Really great. She really covers lies and scams really well. Some of the material was covered from a different angle by Harari. The stuff about stuff that’s believed by enough people just simply being true even though it’s based on nothing. She covers Ponzi schemes really well, from multilevel marketing to Madoff to bitcoin, and to banking. She ends up with a lot on the long con of diamonds and this is where she is really an expert, and her points get wonderful and clear and just perfect. She covers holy relics and some nice stuff on placebos sprinkled around. I think it’s a pretty great book. Even the diamond and banking stuff was stuff that I kinda sorta knew, but her angle was great.

Here’s the thing I hated hated hated. The book had so many pieces of information and nice turns of phrase and ideas that I highlighted like a freak. I highlighted as much as Harari. Lots of stuff I wanted to remember. So, I had pages and pages of notes in my Kindle.  But it’s a fucking PDF and Kindle lets me highlight and make notes but doesn’t let me send it to myself.  Goddamn it.  So there’s all these ideas that I wanted to keep in my “commonplace” file and go back to and cogitate and maybe use in bits and ideas and…. They are locked in my Kindle. I also can’t send the great hunks here. Damn. Damn. Damn.  So, this is a book that I really loved and learned some and the thinking was great, and it’s locked in the Kindle. And normally my pissy little comments would be outweighed by the zillions of brilliant things I highlighted, but I can’t get those out of the machine, so all I write is my memory and pissy little comments. It’s a really good and she’s a smart cookie thinking about really interesting things.

Okay, good.  Mickey was able to give me a hack to get most of my highlights out of the Kindle.  They are sloppy and some are missing, but I made a lot of notes and at least I have some now.  Here they are.

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itself. That’s why a Big Lie doesn’t need to be convincing. In fact, the bigger and more absurd it is—the less believable—the more it reinforces your basic instinct that no one would lie about something so obviously preposterous. But where do we get these beliefs about objective real- ity, and how do we know that everyone’s are the same? The

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The developing field of social neuroscience emerged about thirty- five years ago with what’s known as theory of mind. The term itself was first used by U.S. psychologist David Premack in a now famous experiment carried out on a chimpanzee named Sarah, to try to deter- mine if she possessed self-awareness. The experiment was called the mirror test; Premack’s team altered Sarah’s appearance by placing a red dot on her forehead. Then they put her in front of a mirror. Instead of assuming she was seeing another chimp with a different appearance and swatting at the imagined intruder, Sarah approached the mirror and instead peered closely at her reflection in the mirror. She reached out her hand to her own forehead, not the mirror, and began touching her forehead, attempting to find and wipe off the red dot that didn’t belong there. In doing so, she demonstrated that she recognized her own reflection (that she had a reflection), understood herself to be an individual, and noticed something out of place.

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This active engagement of theory of mind—my thinking about what you see or believe or know about the same wall—is referred to as “mentalizing,” an ability that includes “the critical ability to make inferences about the intentions of other people and their beliefs and to infer whether the emotions or other states signaled by social cues are or are not an accurate reflection of the actual emotional state of the individual”—in other words, to consider whether others might be lying to us.

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Theory of mind, the very thing that allows us to understand that there is objective fact—and that others might attempt to subvert it—is also the very thing that allows us the ability to lie.

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Because when we transgress deliberately and are not held to account, we tend to do it again, often on a larger scale. We repeat this behavior because having once tested the waters of other people’s perceptions and emerged unscathed, we’ve lear

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This strange game of hide-and-seek is called a flashing defense, and it has nothing to do with blending in. Rather, it exploits the in- ability of many species, particularly birds, to keep their eyes—that is, their brain—fixed on a moving object that doesn’t move in a continu- ous line. The flashing defense makes the blue morpho butterfly seem to rapidly blink in and out of existence as it flies across the sky, making it almost invisible to predators.

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In the same way you can only lie if we all agree upon an objective set of facts, you can only cheat if there is a preexisting expectation of fairness

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the Gauchais effect

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Stranger still, when coached to merely imagine being in a less financially and socially secure position, those same participants became more adept at detecting and deciphering other people’s emo- tions and intent. It appears that wealth and power—or even just imag- ining one possesses it—temporarily diminish one’s theory of mind and ability to successfully mentalize—that is, to think about what someone else is thinking. Another experiment, using completely different methods, showed the same outcome: that power impairs your

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The results showed a striking correlation: the wealthier the partici- pants were, the less able they were to read those faces or to judge their intent.19 Stranger still, when coached to merely imagine being in a less financially and socially secure position, those same participants became more adept at detecting and deciphering other people’s emo- tions and intent. It appears that wealth and power—or even just imag- ining one possesses it—temporarily diminish one’s theory of mind and ability to successfully mentalize—that is, to think about what someone else is thinking.

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apparently we can also prime ourselves simply through the act of lying to “become less confident in the truth.

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Humans will do almost anything to avoid this mental discomfort— not by revising their beliefs, but by ignoring or dismissing or destroying any evidence that controverts it. This act is called motivated reasoning

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At the time, Rochester was a one-industry town, and, as I men- tioned, in 1848 that industry was starting cults. And inventing breakfast cereal—which was also sort of a cult at the time—but, strangely enough,

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But then, the whole latter half of the nineteenth century was weird. Really weird—between electricity, automobiles, and world’s fairs, you can kind of forgive people for encountering something bizarre and saying, “Well, yeah—okay.” Science was new, magic was old, every- thing was strange, and it was probably hard to tell the difference.

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” It was the kind of red tape that can only be cut by green paper,

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People really lose their sense of proportion when they realize they have been genuinely taken in by nonsense, not because the lie itself is so devastating, but because having believed it is. It fundamentally destabilizes one’s sense of objective reality. If they really believed that lie and it was not true, then what else do they believe that might not be true? Is anything they believe true?

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It turns out it’s actually easier to convince someone (anyone) to believe a lie (any lie) than it is to convince that person that they have been lied to once they’ve come to believe the lie

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As Salvador Dalí once said, “The difference between false mem- ories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”17

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The original Chinese snake oil was made from the rendered fat of black water snakes, also called the black water moccasin. It was a transdermal, lipophilic agent with an extraordinary concentration of omega-3 acids, which really did reduce pain and inflammation.

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illusory truth effect,

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Clark Stanley was the original Snake Oil Salesman. At the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, he put on a display so over-the-top (even for the era’s prevailing medical circus-show envi- ronment) that it involved pulling an allegedly live rattlesnake from a sack in front of the terrified, titillated crowd, slitting it open, and throwing it in a pot of boiling water.

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In 1895 approximately one in every two hundred Americans were addicted to either morphine or opium powders.

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in 1888 opiates made up 15 percent of all prescriptions dispensed in the city of Boston—and they were dispensed for everything.

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Warren Buffett once said, “You never know who’s swimming na- ked until the tide goes out

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It may be a lie, but a quality counterfeit object still works precisely the same way the real object would . . . for exactly as long as it is believed to be authentic. And if a thing only needs to be believed in to be effective, was there ever any- thing to value or authority other than belief in the first place?

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The trouble with Hoaxes is not in the belief in the story—it’s in the action that treats the story as if it were true, which has many of the same consequences as if it were.

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In the greater scheme of things, it matters less whether or not a thing is actually true than whether or not it is believed to be.

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In addition to being a cool name for a band, the illusory-truth effect is what turns word of mouth into conventional wisdom. Our brains work with a lot of mental heuristics—those shortcuts like an- ticipating the motion of a bouncing ball before the motion is actually observed—and most of the time they’re helpful.

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They discovered that “false news travels farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information— many times by an order of magnitude.”38 In other words, we all find lies—about anything really—exponentially more compelling than the truth; and Vosoughi’s team got hard numbers outlining exactly how much we love being lied to. The data shows that the truth rarely reached more than 1,000 Twitter users, whereas the most malignant and outrageous lies reached well over 10,000—and, of course, it got there a lot faster. The tweets containing “fake news” stories took one-sixth the time to reach 1,500 people as tweets containing accurate information—and not because they were shared by users with a larger platform or disproportionately amplified by bots.

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In fact, Alzheimer’s patients seem to be immune to the placebo effect, which Trivers chalks up to the fact that Alzheimer’s diminishes the patient’s ability to remember the past or anticipate the future. Without those basic abilities, priming doesn’t work.

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One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

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twelve basic cognitive biases that circumscribes our perception of reality

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Honesty bias may leave you open to being deceived, but by the numbers, the vast majority of in- formation you’re presented with is true.

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Facts are just that which continue to exist, whether or not you believe them.

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We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth

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This makes radiocarbon dating a very precise way of getting a very approximate answer.

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In the end, everything is a gag. — CHARLIE CHAPLIN

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“liars become less confident in the truth after lying,”

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But, as Aldous Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

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The difference between fraud and forgery is the difference between truth and facts. Say you saw a piece of the true cross in a cathedral, and ‡In metalsmithing, making a large bell that can ring once, let alone repeatedly (for centuries) with- out cracking, is a hugely impressive feat. you believed it was genuine. Then you walked across town and went to the Louvre, and saw a painting that you were told was a Picasso, and you believed that too. Now imagine both are exposed as counterfeit. The difference is that belief in the cross is simultaneously belief in a whole structure of religious truth. Exposing one element of the truth as a lie, by definition, challenges the rest of it. The Picasso, on the other hand, you might have just as surely believed was authentic because a curator, brochure, or little plaque on the wall told you so. But you have no skin in the game should it turn out to be a fraud. You didn’t believe it was truth, just a fact. When the fact proves incorrect, you experience no cognitive dis- sonance, because your reality is not contingent on its being true. You’re not enraged or disillusioned. Just misinformed. One is a betrayal of truth, the other a betrayal of facts—a dichot- omy that is possible only if truth and facts are fundamentally different.

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It may seem obvious, and a little stupid, when you consider that what is accepted as fact is merely that which is accepted; but the impli- cations are profound. They’re so profound, in fact, that they’re largely responsible for humanity’s unparalleled evolutionary dominance. It goes all the way back to the idea of collective intelligence—humanity’s great advantage, and unquestionable weakness

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Human belief linked consensus permanently to fact, allowing in- dividuals to aggregate knowledge at an astronomical rate. But it’s also a sort of mass delusion. It’s a lie we all agree to believe, together. It is the basis of civilization. So how much of fact is consensus? How much of what we know is simply what we agree to believe? And what does truth even mean in this context?

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Let’s say that a money box did exist and that it really did print perfect hundred-dollar bills indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s not because the United States government printed it that a hundred- dollar bill is worth a hundred dollars; it’s because we all agree to accept it in a hundred dollars’ worth of trade, even though it’s only paper—trusting the next person to do the same, and the next, and the next. It’s an efficient way to transfer value. That arrangement doesn’t change with a counterfeit bill—not if it’s indistinguishable from an authentic bill.

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after the counterfeit bill has been spent, at that point the lie becomes retroactively true. The counterfeit hundred-dollar bill really part: after the counterfeit bill has been spent, at that point the lie becomes retroactively true. The counterfeit hundred-dollar bill really was worth a hundred dollars.

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The thing about Catholic churches is that each one is technically supposed to be built around a genuine religious relic. It’s Catholic doctrine: you can’t consecrate an altar in a church without a relic. No relic, no altar. No altar, no church.

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all the recognized fragments of the true cross (not including the ones on eBay) taken together would provide enough wood to build a ship.

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The Poetry Remedy: Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind, and Soul by William Sieghart – Stephen Fry is my poetry teacher, and this was written by a friend of his.  The poems are by all different people, but the gag is that people come to this guy with problems, and he prescribes poems for them that will help. It’s a cute idea and he takes it very seriously. It’s not really my cup of meat. I don’t think that’s exactly the way I like to use poetry, but it’s a nice idea.  I pulled some highlights.

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In the words of Alan Bennett, “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

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Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

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you only understand the importance of living when you know you’re going to die.”

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Being an adult means coming to terms with the fact that you will never be as omniscient as you once believed your own parents to be.

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MAKING A FIST Naomi Shihab Nye For the first time, on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. “How do you know if you are going to die?” I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, “When you can no longer make a fist.” Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

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But as the great photographer Aaron Rose once said to me, “In the right light, everything is beautiful.” Highlight (Yellow) | Location 2042

“YOUR TASK” Attributed to Rumi, translator unknown Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

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The wisest people know that the fact something happens to everyone does not somehow invalidate its agony. Pain is pain, whether it is unique or universal.

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RECENSION DAY Duncan Forbes Unburn the boat, rebuild the bridge, Reconsecrate the sacrilege, Unspill the milk, decry the tears, Turn back the clock, relive the years, Replace the smoke inside the fire, Unite fulfilment with desire, Undo the done, gainsay the said, Revitalise the buried dead, Revoke the penalty and clause, Reconstitute unwritten laws, Repair the heart, untie the tongue, Change faithless old to hopeful young, Inure the body to disease And help me to forget you please.

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Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

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I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

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“When I’m gone,” he said, “‘you’ll still hear my voice. It’s just that it won’t annoy you anymore.”

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Get on with life. No one will be scoring you on how desolate you appear.

It's a Wonderful Regency Christmas: Six Merry & Bright Holiday Novellas by Edith Layton – 210415 – So, my buddy, Susie, reads these book reports. She commented that I read lots of different kinds of books, but she didn’t notice any romance. She’s right. I don’t read romance. Many many years ago, just as a goofy lark, a bunch of us read some Danielle Steele book and it was so awful. It was just impossible to read, but I’d never tried anything else that could be broadly called “romance” (I bet some would argue that Steele isn’t that).  So, Susie’s mom writes romance and is quite successful.  Around xmas time Susie gave me one of her mom’s books, actually a collection of short xmas themed romance books and “dared” me to read them.  I always have a lot of books going and I read a small amount every night, so it sometimes times a while, but I finished this, all six stories in the books.

She writes really well. The stories, of course, lack surprise, but that’s true for every genre.  You know in detective booksthat there’s going to be murder. There can be no surprise there, but there’s not much surprise in most forms: you know in the science book there’s no god and you know in the poetry books that time speeds by and love is fleeting. In these stories you know that the woman with the heaving bosom and the strong rich guy are going to get together, but there’s surprise in how the inevitable happens. As I explained, I read it in small chunks, but it held my attention. I didn’t pull any highlights, because it was all so foreign to me that every sentence was strange. It’s hard to convey how outside of my usual reading these stories were. They were all period pieces, and all about some sort of royalty and class. There was constant sex, but never explicit, I guess that’s the romance part. There are magical dogs and ghosts and alternate realities, but always counts and women of just slightly lower class.

All in all, I liked it. I enjoyed diving into an alien subculture. I can’t say that it sucked me in. I’m not eager to read everything in the form, but I’m very grateful to Susie for adding this to the inside of my head. Books are supposed to allow you a glimpse into someone else’s heart and this really did that. And, you know, I’ve always liked heaving bosoms.