#576
Title:
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an ExperimentAuthor: 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.
