The spiritual equivalent of plagiarism, books world

Twice in the past three years or so I've read a book that, when I went to review it, I realized had at least partially "stolen" (you can't copyright titles) of another book, but had also "stolen" a fair chunk of the main idea concept of the former book.

In both cases, the former book had been written less than three years previously. In both cases, the author of the latter book was probably in good place to know about the previous book. In both cases, no credit was offered.

Since this is now twice, I decided to blog about it. (In both cases, I had already noted the issue in my reviews.)

The most recent one, earlier this month, was Adam Grant with "Think Again."

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam M. Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Solid 4-star book. Grant's right that we all could stand to admit more of what we don't know, and from that, rethink about what we think we know. He's also right that getting group rethink going, or interpersonal group rethink without entering "politician mode" or "preacher mode" is also good. Grant talks about how to move beyond all that.

He's even more right about trying to oversimplify issues, and to avoid caveats. This portion reminds me of Idries Shah reminding us that issues have more than two sides to them. This applies to group rethinking especially.

That said, since the subtitle of the book is, whether consciously or not, a riff on Socrates' claim to be the wisest man in Athens by recognizing his own ignorance, we can go "meta" on some of the ideas in the book by the fulcrum of going meta on Socrates, whose self-claims are themselves problematic.

Did Socrates really know more about what he didn't know, or admit more about this, than anybody else in Athens? Or, is this just Platonic PR? Or maybe, per the title of a modern psychological syndrome, old Socrates had himself a bit of Dunning-Krueger syndrome.

And, that leads to an issue in Grant's book.

He doesn't talk about going meta on ourselves, on rethinking our rethinking (without being obsessive). Nor does he talk about the possible reality of D-K syndrome from people claiming they're great rethinkers.

Nor does he address the possibility of people claiming this as a new way to shut down conversation.

"I've already thought through, then REthought through, this issue, and I'm still fine with my position."

I think that Grant (and a few other people who have written longform articles in places like Atlantic on this issue) also underestimate the difficulty of using various reasoning tools in today's world to reach people. People ultimately have to make themselves reachable, and without that, per Omar, my moving vocal cords, having spoken, will have to just move on.

AND ... change!

Given that a philosopher wrote a book with the same main title (Think Again: How to Reason and Argue), and seemingly the same ideas, based on the editorial blurb, three years ago, I've dropped my rating to three stars.

Since Sinnott-Armstrong is a fairly prolific author himself, while I won't say Grant went as far as plagiarism or even the moral equivalent of it, it does come off as sketchy. And, this is the second time in three years I've seen someone, whether intentionally or not, partially hijack the main title of a previously written book on largely the same topic with largely the same angle. Also, S-A taught at Dartmouth while Grant was getting his BA at Harvard.

See, Adam? Rethinking. THAT's going meta.

Beyond that? Sinnott-Armstrong's book just sounds better. In fact, it sounds enough better that I asked for it on interlibrary loan. Unfortunately, his "Moral Skepticisms" is only available as an ebook. (But, it's used for less than $10 on Yellow Satan.)

Update: It IS better. But not THAT close to perfect. And, more important for this blog post, enough different from Grant's book that the spiritual equivalent of plagiarism claim is more attenuated now. (I'm still not ready to dismiss it, though. Per Sinnott-Armstrong and my own previous study in informal logic, and what I know about Bayesian probability ideas, I'd cut my estimate by 2/3 from the original, but I wouldn't get rid of it.

Beyond that, to add to Grant's own book? Finding out he cowrote another book with Sheryl Sandberg, and she blurbed another one? Blech.

The second book is 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain.

24/6 The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week by Tiffany Shlain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good but not great. If it had been ranked a bit higher by others, I would have 3-starred to counteract.

The idea of a digital Shabbos is nice. So is the bit of history Shlain had at the start about other "weeks." That said, the first, if not error, a misstep is there.

She said nobody knows why the Roman 8-day week didn't stick. Sure we do. Christians took over the Jewish 7-day week and things went from there when the Roman Empire Christianized. Indeed, Wiki notes that Constantine officially established it.

The big misstep from my point of view? Why not discuss adults ditching smartphones and tablets entirely? Or never getting them in the first place?

I have a flip phone and never want anything else. I have an old Kindle Fire that, cuz it charged all the way to zero and won't work any more cuz the clock won't reset, that I used to take on vacations rather than the laptop I did before. And, that had to be for a full week's vacation, not just a Thanksgiving or something.

Especially if you do that, the idea of having to hardcore a digital Sabbath isn't as necessary. For instance, I live about 30 minutes from a decent-sized metro area. Every other Saturday, usually, I go there for special grocery shopping and other things. With just a dumbphone, I'm disconnected for half a Saturday right there.

Two other mistakes, or misinterpretations.

Green Bank, West Virginia isn't Net-free because residents have some cozy desire for old time life. As home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, astronomers don't want WiFi or cellphones interfering with their work in general, or the hunt for extraterrestrials in particular. (Really.)

Steve Pinker, in "The Better Angels ..." did not at all prove or empirically demonstrate that human society is becoming more and more violence-free.

Lest I sound like I'm totally knocking her, she does get the general idea, and need for it, right. If you are going to do a full-on digital Sabbath, she has detailed ideas of how to prepare for it. And she's right about getting out in nature and journaling.

The key is digital detachment.

I decided to take it down to 3 stars for one other reason. This isn't new for today's age. There's two other "24/6" books, yes with that title. One's a non-conservative evangelical Christian who calls for Sabbathing in general. The other is CEO of a tech company who (I presume) looks at digital detachment, and perhaps has even more insight into it from his business side.

Shlain might not have heard of the evangelical Xn's book, from 2012. But Aaron Edelheit wrote just 18 months earlier, and he lives somewhere in Silicon Valley himself. And he's Jewish. (And a hardcore Zionist who hates Corbyn and conflates antizionism and antisemitism, but that's another story.)

Without saying the book was plagiarized, I smell plagiarization of the concept.

View all my reviews

Young Hume vs Old Hume: The passions and more

Was there a difference between "young Hume" and "old Hume"? Namely, did he actually repudiate the Treatise, or close to that?

I side with Mossner and others among older Hume interpreters and say yes, above all on the issue of the passions, but also on the radicalness of his skepticism. Per the link, I've already talked about the latter, and why we can't call later Hume a Pyrrhonist.

Some trends in modern neuroscience side with young Hume.

GQ, in a good, and in-depth, interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett, touches on this. A key takeaway, from the first "half chapter" of her new book, is the hot new idea in neuroscience — that, contra "old Hume" and 90 percent of thinkers before 2000, the brain did not develop "for" either thinking or feeling or other things as much as it did for running a body budget.

I would disagree with stress being a "withdrawal" from the body budget. But, the general idea that emotions — including deeper passions, though not called such by here — control the body's budget is interesting. (I also think she's probably wrong on some of the details in her ideas of how a body's budgetary system works.)

So, the Hume of the Treatise could perhaps be called an "emotional Pyrrhonist," then? He was more right than wrong. And, in a sense, anticipated some 19th-century and beyond trends in philosophy. But, of course, this risked him being considered seriously.

But, it didn't have to be that way.

He had the Dialogues published posthumously. Why not turning back to at least some ideas in the Treatise?

As he did not, it means we must take his rejection of it seriously. And, must affirm there was a rejection, contra Harris and many other Hume scholars of today's generation. 

On the passions, if Hume had continued, even gone further, down the road of the Treatise, this essentially would have meant rejection of large chunks of Enlightenment ideas. And, that wasn't happening. I think Hume recognized this. So, along with simply wanting to avoid the bad press, he wanted to distance himself from most the ideas advanced there. Surely, as part of this, now that he had become "established," he recognized that letting the Treatise, or any ideas from its nose, back under the tent would have meant the disintegration of the idea of "le bon David" among men of letters in general, and more specifically, among the likes of the French philosophes. Quelle horreur, some of them might have wondered if some of his early thought was akin to that of Rousseau!

That's why he told Beattie and other Scottish common sense philosophers it was unfair to bring up the Treatise and hold it against him, because he had written it anonymously knowing it would be controversial even before it was launched.

With this, I have finished my series of pieces on Hume, as influenced by James Harris' semi-new bio of Hume. I began with a "prequel" piece on refuting the charge of presentism as a way to try to pretend away Hume's racism (and Aristotle's and others' sexism). That piece links the whole set of pieces on Hume.

Is David Hume just a bundle in my mind? Or just a petard hoisting?

 I'm of course talking about his bundle theory of impressions.

I've often called Hume the first modern(ish) psychologist. He was on more solid ground than a Freud or Jung, at least, and definitely for the limitations of his day.

But?

He was partially right about the self, but not totally, and not close to right on why. The bundle theory is weak. Hume flirts with the land of Berkeley, though he would never admit it. In reality, something like Dennett's subselves is probably a much better explainer of both how and why we don't have a unified, consistent self.

Beyond that, of course, Hume was operating from the typical "blank slate" paradigm of British empiricists. And, of course, this is wrong. Human minds evolved to, on average, have and develop certain conceptions and preconceptions. A baby's brain isn't blank, and while a current subself may be just whichever current set of conceptions and preconceptions are in the saddle, all subselves have those.

Let's look at modern neuroscience. 

GQ, of all places, has a surprisingly good, and in-depth, interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett. A key takeaway, from the first "half chapter" of her new book, is the hot new idea in neuroscience — that, contra "old Hume" and 90 percent of thinkers before 2000, the brain did not develop "for" either thinking or feeling or other things as much as it did for running a body budget.

While I think it can be overblown, there is a generally good core there. That's why the brain has those conceptions and preconceptions — they save energy, and the brain itself is of course the hungriest part of the body.

Along with conceptions and preconceptions come predictions, which also save brain energy.

She noted that some of these come from social learning and that to some degree, "predictions come from a world that curates you." To riff on Hume, thus, we're only not a blank slate, but we're also not in a blank classroom.

However, beyond modern neuroscience, there's a more elemental problem when we look at Hume as Hume on this issue, in his own words.

It's called "petard hoisting," and one of his most famous statements, known in general outline by a fair amount of the non-philosophical world, is a dandy on this.

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

As they say on Twitter? #Boom! 

In essence, to riff on Gertrude Stein's bon mot about Oakland, Hume is saying there's no "I" at the core of "my/him-self."

BUT? He says that:

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other …”

Who? Who's this "I," le bon David, if you're just a perception, or a bundle of them, and nothing more?

Now, defenders of Hume would probably say we should treat this the same way as we do his thoughts on causation. Problem? He never really gives the indication of doing that himself in this case. Nooo ... since that was from the Treatise? He just repudiated it along with the rest.

Now, why?

Here, other than "atheism" for a denial of a permanent self being seen as equivalent to denying the soul, I think it was the other big issue leveled at Hume from the publication of the Treatise to the end of his life

Pyrrhonism, in a word.

Being a skeptic, in general, was problematic enough in his day and age.

Being seen as a Pyrrhonic, not an Academic, Skeptic, within the two schools, was far worse.

In the past, I got into arguments with Dan Kaufman, a philosophy prof in Missouri, over what type of Skeptic, to go with the capital for the schools, Hume was, or if he even knew the difference.

Well, to the degree other men of letters and clergymen distinguished "Pyrrhonic" from "Skeptic," they did, and certainly Hume did.

So, my ideas that he was "confused or ignorant on this?

Not at all.

Rather, this was another part of him repudiating the Treatise — he was repudiating any Pyrrhonic-type skepticism.

This may also be why, in his essays on four schools of philosophy in his "Essays Moral and Political," the essay "The Sceptic" doesn't discuss the Academic-Pyrrhonic difference.

Nope, mythicists, Nazareth is real

And, Jonathan M.S. Pearce, while he may, or may not, have some credibility as a philosopher, is losing more and more on biblical studies issues, and a Christmas vacation has let me detox from reading him at Patheos, due to not having time to look at daily Disqus updates from someone I don't actually follow any more, information which Disqus' notification system has failed to, or maybe deliberately refused to, process.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post, about a post of his where I wound up blocking multiple mythicists, starting with an outright liar.

(Per an update below, originally inserted in the middle of this piece and being kept there even as it lengthens, I appear to have picked up some persnickety Gnu baggage on MeWe, who's also moving into lie-land.)

Said outright liar claimed Nazareth didn't exist in the time of Jesus. I presented a 2009 archaeological study that said "yes it did." He then claimed the Israeli Antiquities Authority pulled back somewhat from the author's statements.

(Pictured at right: A house in Nazareth dated to the first century CE and believed by some Christians to be the house of Jesus' childhood.)

First, that's not the same as rejecting the findings. Second, new archaeological study, from 2015 and ongoing to the degree it can, has found new evidence that says yes it did exist then. His response? Handwaving and talking about Helena. (He then pulled out Jesus ben Pandera, with his one mythicist website claiming he lived circa 100 BCE. Wrong. That's conflating the idea that the HJ may have been based on a Jesus crucified by Alexander Jannaeus with the ben Pandera of the Toledoth Yeshu.) More here on the actual existence of first-century Nazareth. Tis true that we cannot date to more precisely in the first century, but that alone undercuts mythicists.

And, Pearce himself started looking ever more like a mythicist fellow traveler at a minimum in a follow-up post nine months later, last December. From a new post, I quote.

Rene Salm’s thesis in The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, according to archaeological analysis, and not until at least 70 CE.

This is simply not true. One cannot generally date archaeological evidence of habitation to that precise of a time. I'm sure Pearce's quoted author would say something like "but the Judean revolt." And I would respond: Rome did not put every village in Galilee and Judea to fire and the sword. Oh, and I'll take Ken Dark, author of the second linked piece three paragraphs above, over Rene Salm any time. James McGrath, whom I will also take over Salm, offers indirect further evidence for the existence of Nazareth at the time of Jesus.

I want to quote McGrath, as it's another line that to some degree is applicable to mythicists in general:

Even before recent work was done, however, we had a Jewish inscription related to priestly courses which mentioned Nazareth in roughly the third century. One merely had to note the unlikelihood that priests resettling after the destruction of the temple in the year 70 would have founded a town with the name of a fictional site invented by Christians, and one had sufficient evidence to make it likely that Nazareth existed before then.

That's followed by this:

For those who may have bought into the “Nazareth never existed” nonsense, I encourage you to reflect on the fact that you have listened to the archaeological equivalent of young-earth creationists. They might well be genuinely skeptical in other areas, but in this one they’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, and one that simply does not fit the evidence we’ve long had, much less the evidence that has come to light more recently.

Sorry, but it's true.

Dark also notes elsewhere how soon after Jesus' death Christians were to put labels on some sites as being part of Jesus' history. They still may not be accurate, but the earliest of the labelings could reflect an oral history going back further than the first written sources and so, at a minimum, should NOT be rejected out of hand. 

(Update: After posting this to a Philosophy of Religion group on MeWe, I've run into someone exemplifying mythicist tactics and who also looks like a Gnu Atheist. First, he rejects linkage between Nazareth's alleged non-existence and mythicism. When I accuse him of selected reading, he doubles down, claiming that the dating of Nazareth is impossible because the original dig is unscientific. I responded by pointing out Dark's piece, noting he's an academic archaeologist, and that he illustrates how to do comparative dating in such cases. I finished by second response by directly asking him if he's a Gnu as well as if he's a mythicist. [I also think "Cheap Philosophy" completes the trifecta by being a scientism guy.] And, as of 48 hours after my call-out, he hadn't responded. Per the old not-so-cliche? "Silence gives assent."

And, 18 days later, that's truer yet. Cheapo thought he had me by saying Yardenna Alexandre is also an academic archaeologist. Problem for him? She doesn't actually refudiate Dark at all! Nutgraf opens the piece:

Nazareth may be best known for its famous ancient resident — Jesus — but as British-Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre notes in this week’s The Times of Israel Podcast, the once small village with huge name recognition existed well before and well after his lifetime.

Otherwise, he didn't answer my two questions, and so I posted the "Silence gives assent" as part of my response.

It gets worse. He then went on to lie and claim that Dark said he'd found Jesus' house. He then ground-shifted again and became a Gnu Atheist biblical literalist, saying that the New Testament calling Nazareth a "town" not a "village" undermined it. Nope. All that means is that the gospellers, writing 45-75 years later and not from Galilee, were uninformed of the size of Nazareth, and perhaps, along the lines of Nathaniel wondering in John if anything good could come from Nazareth, figuring it "had to be" a town not a village.

The guy has outrightly lied more than once, been unfamiliar with what I said myself and what Ken Dark had said, and been unfamiliar with Alexandre as an alleged refutation of Dark. It's Gnus like this that lead me to call them a modern version of village idiot atheists.)

Pearce says he's "not sold on mythicism" (my emphasis) but he certainly doesn't reject it, claiming he finds Salm's work "interesting though." It must be noted that Salm is not an academic, or even close. Shades of Joe Atwill, he's a music teacher!!! If anything, he's anti-academic vis-a-vis biblical scholarship. You may not be "sold" on mythicism, Jonathan ... but you're close to duck-quacking. Pearce appears to be a budget British version of Mark Carrier (who now claims early Christians thought Jesus was a space alien, or maybe a British Neil Carter. He's got just an M.S., not a Ph.D., but otherwise promoting himself, doing freelance teaching, etc.? The same. And for someone with some sort of academic background to call Salm "interesting though" and surely knowing Salm's background? Pearce is close to, if not full-on, duck quacking.

So, yes, Pearce, that's why I'll take LOTS of people over Salm.

AND, lots of people over you. And, now that I see you've been at Skeptic Ink as well as Patheos, I'll add to that. Especially given that you're arguably an Islamophobe.

(Update, June 12: Pierce says now he leans away from mythicism, and actually, see below as for how it plays out, cites things like the scandal of particularity to boost a historical Jesus claim.)

Finally, there's the scandal of particularity, perhaps strongest in John, where Nathaniel sneers in John 1:45, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" and John 7 having the rhetorical question about the Messiah not coming from Galilee. Per Pearce's post in question at his comment, I agree with him than Matthew 2 mangles "netzer." BUT ... Matthew is doing pesher on the Tanakh via the Septuagint. (The author of the Gospel was almost certainly a Greek-speaker.) And, perhaps, this is his attempt to explain away where Jesus is from with hand-waving, or to deliberate conflate different Hebrew words into a bad pun or three, shades of the Yahwist. The wrongness, deliberate mangling, or whatever, is no proof that Nazareth didn't exist. None.

Per History for Atheists, what we're seeing Pearce do is a commonplace among mythicists: Attack Matthew not for using the wrong word, or botching two Hebrew ideas together (which is still possible), but for deliberate substitution as sleight-of-hand. In this case, it's also a "fail." A Greek-speaking Jew from the diaspora, more familiar with Galilee perhaps than Mark but not that familiar, would likely not know that this was a sleight of hand. And, as HfA notes, Mark uses a different Greek word than Matthew, meaning at a minimum, both aren't committing the same wrong.

The most likely story, given he had one known Zealot (anachronistic to a degree) and one possible Sicarian disciple is that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, and that this was indeed an embarrassment. As gospelers reached the second and third generations, they not only invented a birth for him in Bethlehem, but also invented a Davidic family tree which most likely is totally untrue in both Matthew and Luke.

===

Pearce himself claims not to be a mythicist but has said the historic Jesus idea is basically silly. It's less silly than accepting at face value the claims of a non-academic like Salm, dude. Philosophically, you know what "operationalism" is and you've demonstrated it.

He is also apparently an Islamophobe.

Le bon David: David Hume as litterateur

James Harris refers several times to the idea of Hume as "le bon David." He and E.C. Mossner both paint him as being a "man of letters" as much or more than a philosopher, so let's just use the French there.

Two questions.

First, just how much was Hume "le bon," in dealings with Rousseau, James Beattie and others, and how much is this a legend?

Second, was he always that good as a litterateur? That's both in terms of his writing style and how much he, at least in materials not for public consumption (Burn this!) had his own sharp elbows at times.

Let's jump in.

First, Hume is without a doubt one of the most readable philosophers past or present. It's not just that he's easy to understand, overall, on most more technical stuff. Or that, even for his era, he's not that "technical" of a philosopher.

Especially as shown in things like his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he writes well. He's readable.

On the other hand, if one looks at things like some of his essays, at times he seems to be a "trimmer." As in, a writer of puff pieces. Oh, they have a certain amount of fluff style, or the 1700s England equivalent. But, they're fairly superficial.

Another place where the "litterateur" is fluff without a lot of substance? Slavery and related issues. Back to that again, yes.

Second, some of Hume’s alleged “anti-slavery” comments actually come off as stuff similar to what Stephen Douglas said about slavery’s potential in the High Plains and the West — simply utilitarian claims about where (or in Hume’s case, for how much longer as well as where) slavery would prosper. Douglas otherwise had no moral problems with slavery and Hume, to me, at best shows moral diffidence.

Plus, when it comes to the repudiated "Treatise" (and he DID repudiate, contra Harris, and I'll have a separate piece on just that), Hume had a thin skin. No other way to put it.

To undercut Harris’ (and Hume’s own) claim that “le bon David” never replied to critics?

Back to his 1777 Advertisement:

“Yet several writers, who have honoured the Author's Philosophy with answers, have taken care to direct all their batteries against that juvenile work, which the Author never acknowledged, and have affected to triumph in any advantages, which, they imagined, they had obtained over it: A practice very contrary to all rules of candour and fair-dealing, and a strong instance of those polemical artifices, which a bigotted zeal thinks itself authorised to employ.”

Methinks he doth protest WAY too much.