text: New Book Deceived Wisdom by David Bradley | Pulse-Project.org
  New Book Deceived Wisdom by David Bradley
  David Bradley wrote a guest blog for us many years ago, he has recently published a wonderful book. Do get to your local bookstore and check out his book.
  What is it about: The world is full of myths just waiting to be debunked, misconceptions ready to be corrected and seemingly interesting factoids that are nothing more than fictions. I call it Deceived Wisdom in my new book and shave away the cruft with Occam's razor of rationality. The fitness fallacies that fail, the dietary deceptions that dupe and a miscellany of misconceptions that must be mashed.
  It is odd, you might think, that Deceived Wisdom exists, most of us are naturally inquisitive right from early childhood, we are many of us sceptical of what grandparents uses to take for granted and yet I found enough Deceived Wisdom to write a whole back about why what you thought was right is actually wrong. Some of it is of no more importance than shirking the pub know-all but some deceived wisdom has to be deflated for the sake of our wellbeing. One can adopt an approach to the world based on hearsay, old wives' tales, call it what you will, but ultimately you may learn to your chagrin or detriment that it's wrong. There is an alternative approach, a science-based approach, where you make observations, weigh up the evidence and come to a scientific conclusion about what is a proper fact and what is just deceived wisdom. The simplest, rather than the most contrived, explanation, is usually closer to the truth.
  In Deceived Wisdom I hope to lay to rest those factual fictions. I hope you will discover how to make the most of that bottle of wine without fuss, the reason you should continue to recycle your aluminium cans rather than sending them to landfill and why you should never accept the urinary advances of a lifeguard no matter how bad your jellyfish sting.
  And, here's one last bit of Deceived Wisdom you may have heard about:
  "You have to be very, very clever to do science"
  Well, you don't. There are, of course, clever scientists, but science is about observation, about evidence about curiosity. You don't have to have superpowers or even a white lab coat and wild hair to do science. We are all inquisitive long before we walk or talk. Observing and trying to understand the world around us comes before we even start trying to represent it with our words and pictures. In fact, you don't have to be very, very clever to do science, we can all explore, we can all observe, we can all spot the deceived wisdom if we try. Here is the link Deceived Wisdom: Why What You Thought Was Right Is Wrong