Views from Crestmont Drive

Subtitled “The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy”
(Oxford, August 2021, xvii + 245pp, including 25pp notes and index)

Here’s the last of several books about current issues that I read in December and January. I read this one because I liked the author’s previous book, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE (reviewed here). And this one has an unexpected counter-intuitive thesis: that the discontent in the modern world is derived from how successful we’ve been in creating it.

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As with previous reviews, my complete notes are below, following this summary set of bullets. Continue reading →

Subtitled “Why We Never Think Alone”
(Riverhead Books, March 2017, 296pp including 30pp acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

This is a book that I’ve thought of as a companion to the O’Connor/Weatherall book I just reviewed ever since they’ve been sitting together on my TBR shelves for the 6 or 7 years since they were published. Their themes seemed adjacent, their dustjackets are similar, and  each has two coauthors, none of whom I’d heard of before.

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Subtitled “How False Beliefs Spread”(Yale University Press, 2019, 266pp, including 80pp of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index)

This is an interesting enough book that wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It seems right up my alley: why do so many people believe things that are not true? Sure social media is involved (with their conspiracy theorists and chaos agents), and we understand that most people know only what they hear from social media or glean from casually interacting with their friends and neighbors. Further, no matter how ambitious or well-intentioned one is, no one can acquire first-hand knowledge about everything, so to some extent we rely on experts, or at least on the conclusions of those who have studied matters more deeply than we are able to. Even further, as I’ve discussed, most people live their mundane lives without any great concern about whether what they believe about matters outside their immediate concern are true or not; they don’t care, and it doesn’t actually matter toward living a good life.

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