UNFINISHED READING - Beliefism by Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan is a Proffessor in Behavioural Science at the LSE, a podcaster and author, whose central topics have been happiness and are beliefism. This book covers similar territory to Jon Yates's book Fractured, but to my mind it does so far less effectively.  They are both really examining how homophyly ( People Like Us Syndrome ) is operating in our society, and how an excess of it is deleterious to the performance of a democratic society.

I have given up on this book, mainly because I didn't respond well to the manner in which it is written, and I could feel my hackles rising every time there was a new checklist. Dolan is very fond of a mnemonic ( eg. EMBRACE - goodness my life is too short to explain that one) as an aid to practicing breaking out of beliefism. It may be some folk do find these useful, but I do not. The only list I find useful is for shopping.

Coming, as he does from a social science background. Dolan's thesis is littered with niche jargon that is largely not self explanatory. Here are a few examples - The hot and cold empathy gap - The somatic marker hypothesis - FAE Fundamental Attribution Error - Safety Net Libertarianism - Exposed Cognitive Diversity - AP Affective Polarisation - Negative Utilitarianism - Feeling Thermometer. I mean, feeling thermometer, I've definitely got one of those, and it says specialist language for special people.

One of the main virtues of Jon Yates's book was that it strenuously avoided using this sort of pseudo scientific language, and chose to make writing plainly and clearly a self evident necessity, in order to be intelligible to a much wider readership. Even the term Beliefism, I would suggest, is not that helpful either. Just stick an ism on the end doesn't make something more understandable.

So, I've abandoned this book at page 131, with sixty five pages to go. It's no good regretting my impulse purchase now, nor of the waste of paper that this is a hardback. But there are becoming some recurring themes in the books that remain unfinished by me, and impulse purchasing is one of them. Dolan is. I assume, a sincere man. With a laudable aim to fight back against one if the most pernicious maladies affecting our civilisation and its future. So I applaud his efforts in that regard. But, I just found this book unnecessarily heavy going. 

His choice of frames for his spectacles was not an issue for me until I read his book. After that I was subject to a cascade of my own personal prejudices.

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8