Although dry at times, this book addresses logic and critical thinking, and how they can be used to evaluate supernatural claims, in a complete and easy to understand way. A glance at the tags for this book will reveal the breadth of scope - I recorded eighteen separate non-evidence based topics that were addressed (including ESP, psychics and homeopathy), and I was not trying to record all of the topics that were touched upon.

I would recommend this book if you are looking for a high school/college introductory-level textbook on logic, or if you get frustrated with a majority of the debunkers you read and want to see it done carefully and cleanly. The book is heavily sourced, and each chapter ends with review questions and problems. ( )

I've often wondered how my life might have been different if I had been given a good course in critical thinking skills in high school or college. Had I been so fortunate, this book would have been the best text I could imagine for such a course.

A lot of the information covered here was familiar to me from other reading I've done in the last few years, but this book is by far the most comprehensive collection of all of the things one needs to know to effectively evaluate the ideas we are exposed to about the world around us and how it works. It covers everything from the basics of possibility and logic, what makes an argument good or bad, different ways of knowing and perceiving, cognitive biases that can skew our objectivity and the foundations of scientific thought processes. Interspersed within the more technical portions of the text are sidebars applying the principles at hand to various popular extraordinary claims such as instances of apparent ESP and things like the Amityville haunting.

This book is an actual textbook. Though the authors do a fairly good job of making it readable by using these sidebars and other interesting examples for much of what they cover, there are still a few sections that were rather on the dry side. Though this made parts of the book a bit of a slog, what I learned from it was more than valuable enough for me to keep going.

Among the sections that I personally found most useful were the discussions of how quirks in our perceptual systems can cause us to misinterpret what's happening around us, the problems with appealing to mystical experience as a way of knowing, and the discussion of just how damaging it can be to believe things on insufficient evidence. In a chapter called 'Case Studies in the Extraordinary,' the critical thinking processes outlined earlier are applied to the juicy topics of homeopathy, dowsing, UFO abductions, communicating with the dead, near-death experiences, ghosts and conspiracy theories. The authors are careful to refrain from saying definitively whether these things are or aren't real, but instead show the reader how to evaluate the evidence and come to their own conclusions about which ideas are genuinely worthy of consideration. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks. ( )

This book was fantastic! Before I read How to Think About Weird Things I had never really read a book about critical thinking. I had always thought of myself as a sharp person and able to see the fallacies in poor arguments, but this book really helped to sharpen my dissection of ideas and arguments. While the book is meant to push the reader to think and to understand the world with a keener eye for mistakes we all make in our day to day lives, it was also an extremely entertaining read. The author uses many many quotes which are both humorous and very poignant. In addition to this countless real life asides are used to illustrate thought fallacies which the book describes.

I picked it up in a used bookstore where it had been miss-shelved… So, I don’t know much about it, but it appears to be a text book for a college or high school course. Having said that, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve ever read a text book which was so enjoyable. If all of my college texts had been this well conceived, I would have definitely been a more studious reader of texts.

--This is cross posted at my blog Lucid Ink-- ( )

Learn how to evaluate beliefs scientifically, and hear criticism for various spiritual concepts, particularly those from the New Age. This book isn't as neutral as it claims to be; it tends to take the stance that only scientifically provable things are worth believing in. ( )