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October 20 2019
Book review: Humans: A Brief History Of How We F*cked It All Up
by Tom Phillips, (c) 2018
This was an amusing read I came across at the local library's New
Releases section (new in the US; 2018 in the UK). Phillips [0] is
a journalist and the editor of Full Fact [1] , an independent
fact-checking organization in the UK. Prior to that he was editorial
director at BuzzFeed UK. He also seems to have a solid background
for commenting on the human condition having studied archaeology,
anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge
University.
Even though written tongue in cheek, Phillips' book is a serious
chronicle of humanity's propensity to fuck things up wherever and
whenever possible. It starts at pretty much the root of the matter,
the evolution of our faulty thinking. Anyone who has ever even
casually looked into why their crazy uncle can't seem to understand
their perfectly reasonable argument has likely come across the
rather startling long list of cognitive biases [1] we humans are
saddled with. Many of these quirks may well have served us in our
distant past but today they increasingly trip us up.
I particularly liked this list at the end of chapter 1:
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5 of the Weirdest Manias in History
Dancing Manias
Outbreaks of inexplicable, uncontrollable dancing were common in
much of Europe between 1300s and the 1600s, sometimes involving
thousands of people. Nobody's entirely sure why.
Well Poisoning
Around the same time, mass panic at false rumors of wells being
poisoned were also common--normally blamed on Jews. Some panics
led to riots and Jewish homes being burned.
Penis Theft
Outbreaks of panic that malign forces are stealing or shrinking
men's penises appear all around the world--blamed on witches in
medieval Europe, on poisoned food in Asia or on sorcerers in
Africa.
Laughing Epidemics
Since the 1960s, epidemics of unstoppable laughter have occurred
in many African schools--one famous outbreak in Tanzania in 1962
lasted a year and a half, forcing schools to temporarily close.
The Red Scare
A classic "moral panic", a wave of anticommunist hysteria swept
the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, as the media and populist
politicians spread the exaggerated belief that communist agents
had infiltrated every part of US society.
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Crazy stuff; really makes one wonder about that cranial wiring.
The chapters that follow hit upon our long legacy of environmental
destruction, our penchant for picking truly awful leaders, epic
failures in diplomacy and the subsequent wars, failures to foresee
fairly obvious things coming and miss-adventures in Science.
I won't go into anymore detail as it's a fairly quick and enjoyable
read for anyone not so enamored with humanity track record to date.
And it should be required reading for proponents of technologies
like AI and geoengineering which have the potential of taking epic
human fuck-ups to a whole new level.
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[0] https://tom-phillips.com/
[1] https://fullfact.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases