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The Easiest Person to Fool

This week, I uncovered layers of nonsense interspersed with some good information. 

The Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube mentioned a book where she'd learned about tapping pressure points. I've used acupressure in the past and found some relief for a few different problems, so I looked up the book: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It was a New York Times #1 best seller and has over 46,000 reviews on Amazon. 

Yet as I read it, various things leapt out as improbable: a child who didn't recognize himself in the mirror; psychological trauma in childhood resulting in a lack of neurological development in the brain; and finally the story of a man who suddenly "remembered" being molested by a priest.

Can that be right? Photo from Pexels.

In humans' 2 million year history, children must have gone through much more trauma than kids of the late 20th century, let alone the current crop. How could they have functioned as adults lacking neurological development? Likewise, how could stone-age humans have known what traumatizing dangers to avoid if they forgot about the trauma--particularly before humans could speak and pass on knowledge?

Clinical studies debunked so-called "recovered memories" years before The Body Keeps the Score came out. The book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) devotes an entire chapter to the subject, recalling the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s where innocent people spent long stretches in prison for "crimes" that therapists and counselors implanted in children's impressionable minds. "Experiencers" who sincerely believe they were abducted by space aliens illustrate the fallibility of memory. Even skeptic Michael Shermer imagined he had such an experience (but realized it was a hallucination due to exhaustion). Mistakes were Made mentions Bessel van der Kolk (the author of the previous book) and quotes his court testimony that he wasn't aware of disconfirming evidence of repressed memories. Other chapters recommend skepticism, the scientific method, seeing things from different points of view, and warn against self-justification. The book got a glowing review from Dr. Michael Eades of Protein Power back in 2008. 

The book was updated in 2019 with a chapter on two people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They're worried he's dividing the country. They're frightened that he's a threat to democracy, that he'll start a war with Iran or even a civil war. They compare the US to 1930s Europe, comparing Trump to Mussolini, quoting Mein Kampf and warning that things under demagogues don't end well.  They demonize Trump and his supporters and believe anyone who would vote for him is probably too far gone to see reason. 

The two people with TDS are the authors, in the midst of a moral panic like the ones they write about. They don't realize it--or at least didn't at the time. They should have taken their friends' advice to scrap the chapter since politics is clearly outside their bailiwick judging by their wild fantasies. Not that they can't have a well-informed opinion about something they're not experts on, but I get the sense that they started with their conclusions and looked for (only) confirming evidence, which is the opposite of what scientists are supposed to do.

The easiest people to fool are academics (and journalists), as James Randi said. (All the authors of the books mentioned are academics.) Nassim Taleb went to pieces at the beginning of the pandemic, van der Kolk hasn't thought about evolution, and Mistakes were Made, But Not by Me, indeed. 

One good thing I got out of The Body Keeps the Score was the author's experience with concentration camp survivors. He noted many of them who came to America were successful, didn't like to talk about the camps, and most weren't interested in therapy. Maybe those three things are related. 

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