Skip to main content

Born to be Good – Dacher Keltner ***

There has been a spate of books over recent years on the science of morals, happiness and more. In this book, joining the crowd, Dacher Keltner examines the science of a meaningful life.
He starts off in a way that immediately raises suspicions. I’m sure what he’s trying to do is be more approachable – and perhaps that works for some audiences – but for me, the way he brings in Eastern philosophies and is always relating things to the Confucian concept of ‘jen’ which apparently ‘refers to kindness, humanity and reverence’ is worrying. In many aspects of science, the tendency to bring in Eastern philosophies is a red flag that this the rest of the contents are pseudo-science, based on vague similarities between, for example, Daoist ideas and quantum theory. So we then get a fusion of misplaced quantum physics terminology and woo. That isn’t really what’s happening here – Keltner just wants to emphasize the importance of what was represented by jen in real, scientific observations on human nature – but the use, which continues throughout the book with a pseudo-scientific ‘jen ratio’ inevitably taints the content and makes it difficult to take it entirely seriously.
This worry is reinforced when occasionally the author seems to force the point to match his Eastern philosophy = good stuff mantra. He tells us that using emotion as a guide, as emphasized by Eastern religions, is a good thing – but uses illustrations where the feelings tell us to hate someone, but instilled behaviour says we should tolerate them. Is this really a good thing? He seems to be arguing for the lynch mob over the civilized trial. The reasoning to support his argument seems fatally flawed here. Equally, he shows a ludicrously over-the-top reverence for the Dalai Lama, devoting several pages to being thrilled at being touched by him. He should, perhaps, take the advice of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s analyst in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: ‘He’s just this guy, you know?’
It’s not all like that by any means. There is a lot of material in here. Under this ‘meaningful life’ banner, Keltner covers kindness, embarrassment, smiling, laughter, teasing, touching, love, compassion and awe. The approach is very observational. In a lot of sections he describes how videos of people’s reactions are broken down frame by frame to detect facial responses, while there are also reports of brain scans providing a clue to what’s going on in a particular activity. There’s plenty of content – but it’s not always easy to see how a particular conclusion is drawn. It all seems strung together rather haphazardly. I was particularly doubtful about the teasing section, which played down the negative side of teasing – despite what Keltner says, there is a very fine line between teasing and bullying, and much teasing is unpleasant for the victim. On the plus side, apart from the Dalai Lama worship, the touching section was particularly interesting, though the numbers used to analyze people’s guess at the intention of touch were hard to interpret. I was also a bit worried that Freud is spoken of in several places in a fairly positive way, as if he hadn’t been discredited as being totally unscientific.
The conclusion of the book is ‘we are wired for good’ – and though elements of this do come through in the results, there is feeling that this is a search for a conclusion that the author had before he began, with selective interpretation of results along the way. Not entirely satisfactory.

Paperback:  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more