Luck Factor
Jun. 4th, 2019 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfbiterRichard Wiseman - Luck Factor
Pessimists tend to forget their successes and emphasize their failures. Optimists in turn are more likely to forgot and disregard their failures (and may refuse to learn anything from them). So this book seems to claim that their attitude would increase the number of successes.
Wiseman is a cognitive researcher who is famous for the video where people did not notice the man in a gorilla costume when they were counting the bounces of a ball. This book is like a pseudoscientific validation for his apparently optimistic worldview. He apparently ignores any negative findings he may have, touting only those that support his point of view - just like certain other kinds of people.
If he would state that optimists feel better and that being a pessimist all the time is counterproductive, I would have lot less to complain. However, this book looks exactly like the "just believe and you shall automatically receive" school of "self-help". Not that different from The Secret.
The spiel is not any different from many other self-help books that mainly tout that if you're not successful, you do not believe strong enough. Just like would-be-spirit healers who say that if their patients do not recover, that's the patient's fault because they do not believe enough. Wiseman does not state it outright in the text, but the main idea of the book boils down to similar attitude - pessimists have only themselves to blame because of their attitude which is of course dissimilar to that of Wiseman himself, and therefore faulty.
(Note that this book was praised in the local skeptic society magazine - they published the writer's article twice.)
Optimism supposedly automatically leads to successes - including better results in the telephone marketing and lotteries. All you need is the right marketing spiel and the right attitude and people buy anything? The fact that people simply may not have the interest or even the money means nothing?
And of course, if the situation does not improve when you turn into a baseless optimist, you are to blame because you are "mentally lazy" and do not believe strongly enough. Sound familiar?
Pessimists tend to forget their successes and emphasize their failures. Optimists in turn are more likely to forgot and disregard their failures (and may refuse to learn anything from them). So this book seems to claim that their attitude would increase the number of successes.
Wiseman is a cognitive researcher who is famous for the video where people did not notice the man in a gorilla costume when they were counting the bounces of a ball. This book is like a pseudoscientific validation for his apparently optimistic worldview. He apparently ignores any negative findings he may have, touting only those that support his point of view - just like certain other kinds of people.
If he would state that optimists feel better and that being a pessimist all the time is counterproductive, I would have lot less to complain. However, this book looks exactly like the "just believe and you shall automatically receive" school of "self-help". Not that different from The Secret.
The spiel is not any different from many other self-help books that mainly tout that if you're not successful, you do not believe strong enough. Just like would-be-spirit healers who say that if their patients do not recover, that's the patient's fault because they do not believe enough. Wiseman does not state it outright in the text, but the main idea of the book boils down to similar attitude - pessimists have only themselves to blame because of their attitude which is of course dissimilar to that of Wiseman himself, and therefore faulty.
(Note that this book was praised in the local skeptic society magazine - they published the writer's article twice.)
Optimism supposedly automatically leads to successes - including better results in the telephone marketing and lotteries. All you need is the right marketing spiel and the right attitude and people buy anything? The fact that people simply may not have the interest or even the money means nothing?
And of course, if the situation does not improve when you turn into a baseless optimist, you are to blame because you are "mentally lazy" and do not believe strongly enough. Sound familiar?
