A review by frudzicz
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

medium-paced

1.25

I don’t usually add reviews but, for pop-science books like this, especially more popular ones (unfortunately, like this) I think it’s important to raise the red flag when the book can have harmful effects. 

 

This book is bad. Really bad. Incredibly bad and probably dangerous. 

 

First, I just wanted to briefly mention that it can also be very annoying. Here are three examples: 

 

1. the chapter ‘A Dream of Socrates’ as a whole, reads like a 12-year-old wrote it. This appears to be Deutsch’s attempt to mimic aspects of the (much better) book Godel, Escher, and Bach but, unlike that book, Deutsch does not seem to be aware of his point, which seems to be that he looked up the mythical God Hermes on Wikipedia.
2. the book is sprinkled throughout with outright assertions with very little evidence, rationale or (ironically, given the only salient thesis of the book) explanation. These assertions range from merely stubborn (the outright, unequivocal claim that ‘empiricism is false’) to baffling (various outright assertions about how *aliens* would definitely behave, should we meet them). This blunt, careless way of thinking is very …. ‘atypical’ in science.
3. there is no structure to the book. There are superficial visits to the multiverse, quantum computing, Easter Island, and so on but no real through-line other than “explanations good” and “problems are soluble” (ok, the other thesis of this book). It reads as though Deutsch simply wanted to express his ‘weekend opinions’ on conversations that others were having in his absence.

 
So, mostly this book was just annoying until the chapter Unsustainable, in which this nonsensical, flat-footed, overly binary way of thinking really comes to a head. First, he asserts that the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide is “not yet accurately known” which…seems to ignore decades of very compelling evidence to the contrary. Second, he suggests that understanding humanity’s affect on climate is a useless political debate, which is ridiculous — if we know THAT we’re causing the change, and HOW we’re causing the change, then we can try to address the cause of the problem. He briefly makes a weird false equivalence (and ‘straw man’, for good measure) with hurricanes (essentially, “imagine if we only prepared for human-induced hurricanes”), which is an outrageously illogical attempt at an argument. Finally, instead, he suggests that we should simply have faith in some future technological solution to climate change (he suggests that we can produce CLOUDS over the ocean!) and that it is desirable for our entire species to *live unsustainably* until some future solution ‘redeems’ us. This is the most insane, anti-scientific example of magical thinking I’ve read in a very long time.
 

I read this book as a sort of perverse anthropological study of modern pop-science. I strongly suggest that you read this book carefully and skeptically. Make it a “Where’s Waldo” of illogic and fallacy and protect your thoughts against its superstitious exalting of “explanations”.