The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

#576
Title: The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2009
256 pages

Contrary to the opinion of some of my otherwise right-thinking online book review friends, I thought this was better than Jacobs's previous two books. Perhaps this is because those challenges' massive scope and long duration (reading the encyclopedia and living by biblical precepts) were enormous, which introduced too many opportunities for inconsistency, intellectual shallowness, and general pronouncements that seemed to me to miss the point of the experiment. Here, the scale suits the experiments, which are reasonably contained and do not have such grand philosophical rationalizations. In this, the book seems much more honest. I particularly like the exploration of outsourcing one's life. It was interesting, humorous, and Jacobs's analysis of its implications seemed reasonable and appropriately scaled. The chapter on cognitive errors and distortions was highly-notated but, as my students would attest, clearly the work of someone outside the field of cognitive therapy.

I mildly submit an addendum to the anecdote in which Jacobs's aunt sends him an e-mail about "God's Pharmacy," in which "the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition" (p. 89). Jacobs's informs his aunt that this is an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Good start. However, this only scratches the surface. The technical name for the underlying philosophy of the e-mail is the Doctrine of Signatures. Also according to his source, Wikipedia, "herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body." This was also extended to foods (e.g., eat walnuts for your brain; don't eat potatoes because they look like leperous fingers), which I know from recently reading a book about the history of the potato. I realize Jacobs is a magazine writer and that the point here isn't depth or interesting tangents, but it does surprise me a little that he doesn't seem to be familiar with the concept, since it figured heavily (and still does today) in the medical practices of much of the world and therefore surely appears multiple times in the encyclopedia, and the logic it relies on is repeated over and over in Jewish law, which uses a different form of analogy than does English Common Law.