The Undercover Philosopher

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said “The world is all that is the case”. He should have actually said: “The world is just a big con”. Our lying, cheating hearts make living a giant exercise in evading deception, lies and half-truths. Are reason’s headlights powerful enough to navigate this fog? We have to try and figure out this trick. American philosopher Michael Philips’s The Undercover Philosopher helps us do just that.

The book’s basic premise is that the world and our senses gang up to fool us about how we can survive. We’re thinking machines, but thinking itself is fraught with problems. Take our inability to understand “base rates” or frequency of occurrences of something. Philips describes the horrific effect it had in the US in the 70s, where doctors ended up diagnosing more women with breast cancer because they could not factor in the false positives that mammograms throw up.

Then there are a host of other things like using “pre-existing beliefs” to arrive at a conclusion. For instance, a Pakistani swing prodigy will be branded a ball-tamperer. Then, if something does not match our beliefs exactly we simply interpret it in a way that makes it fit; an example of “confirmation bias”. So if we don’t find any proof of ball-tampering with this bowler then we might simply say that’s because the ICC is sucking up to the Pakistan Cricket Board.

If our mental machinery is faulty, the world outside is equally ruthless. It presents us with flawed data. Philips takes to task all sorts of people here: stock brokers, psychics, economists and even the police. For instance, stock brokers say the market is efficient and yet peddle ways that will beat the very same market.

So is there a way out? Philips says yes. For starters, we must guard against personal agendas, which, in modern society, almost everyone has. Second, do not “follow the leader.” One of the reasons why even senior managers at Satyam were caught totally unawares by Ramalinga Raju’s confession is because they had put him on a pedestal and could not question him. Finally, we owe it to ourselves to ask for hard evidence before we believe anything. Philips extends this thought to religion as well. He says, “Because I choose to believe something without evidence at all, you Infidel must be driven from the Holy Land”.

We know what he means!
The Undercover Philosopher is a slightly tough read but lots of fun.