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: - - - 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. - - - 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. - - [0] https://tom-phillips.com/ [1] https://fullfact.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases