If you ARE a WOMBAT Systems Analyst, disregard this page.

I feel compelled to interrupt at this point. I am, by nature, a skeptic, and when I see a book so filled with nonsense as this one is, I grow enraged. Even when, as this book claims, the nonsense is designed to provoke thinking.

I don't believe that people are intrinsically stupid, but on the whole, they are never taught the tools necessary to tell the difference between truth, falsehood, and irrelevance. Even an intelligent species like ours can't be expected to think critically when they've never learned how to do so.

Many of the decisions we make every day, from which foods we should eat to whom we should vote for, are never considered as carefully as they should be. It's very easy to read a study "proving" that red meat causes colon cancer, or to hear a politician spout off about the National Debt. If you don't know the facts, and what to do with them, you can't evaluate these sources of information critically. Ideally, everyone would be perfectly informed about everything, but in practice this is impossible. If you CAN'T find out the facts, then at least have the decency to admit when you don't know!

Mere facts aren't enough either. Knowing rules of critical thinking is at least as important as having the facts. Knowing to check the credentials of the people telling you the facts, wondering how facts fit together, and which ones seem suspicious. These are crucial skills. I can't pass them on to you in a single page, but I CAN stress their importance.

It's easy for this book to talk about alien mind-control, Easter Bunnies, future destiny of humanity, Gods, and whatnot, and all too easy to use these things as an escape mechanism. It's much harder, but much more important, to THINK CLEARLY about issues that matter. Decide what your values are, and what they say is important, and then THINK about it, clearly. This is what we mean when we say "decide for yourself".

The scientific method - inference from available data, hypothesis, experiment, refinement of the hypothesis - is one of your most valuable tools. Learn to use it well. Learn to wield Occam's Razor: decide whether it's more reasonable to believe in UFO's or the suggestibility and gullibility of human beings. And no matter what conclusions you eventually draw, never be reluctant to throw them away when the facts show them up as false.

That's the most important criteria: falsifiability. If there's no way, even in theory, to tell whether an idea is true or false, it PROBABLY DOESN'T MATTER, because it will never make any difference in your life. About 90% of what I've seen in this book is irrelevant, because it's unfalsifiable, and untestable.

I can't teach you on a single page how to think clearly, but I can bloody well say you should try.

WOMBAT Systems Analysts may now return to their lives.