The Magic (The Secret, #3) by Rhonda Byrne

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The problem is, it's not the science she thinks it is. The law of tourist attraction has actually been around for centuries; Byrne cites Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Edison, Carnegie, Einstein and even Jesus himself as adepts. Just in the previous century, it has actually been consistently expressed in essentially the same form as Byrne's version by Wallace Wattles ("The Science of Getting Rich"), Napoleon Hill ("Think and Grow Abundant") and many other writers.

Why is this specific pseudoscientific idea so persistent? The message of "The Power" and "The Secret" may best be understood as a sophisticated meme a sort of intellectual virus whose structure has evolved throughout history to optimally exploit a suite of weaknesses in the design of the human mind. Had Byrne and the other purveyors of "The Secret" (consisting of Oprah Winfrey, who repeatedly plugged it on her program) set out to enjoy big profits by controling cognitive biases wired into the brain, they could barely have actually done a better task.

The very first technique they use is what psychologists call "social evidence." People like to do things other individuals are doing because it seems to show the value of their own actions. That is why QVC displays a running count of the number of viewers have actually purchased each item for sale, and why advice appears more credible if it appears to come from various individuals instead of one.

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In "The Power," Byrne likewise estimates sages like Thoreau, Gandhi and St. Augustine. This ploy, an example of a related logical fallacy called the argument from authority, taps our user-friendly beliefs so forcefully that we psychology professors spend time training our introductory students to actively withstand it. Byrne likewise triggers what might be called the illusion of capacity, our readiness to believe that we have a large tank of untapped capabilities just waiting to be launched.

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Regrettably, rigorous empirical research studies have repeatedly revealed that none of these things produce any significant improvement in intelligence."The Power" and "The Secret" are larded with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. This last is a telltale sign: whenever you hear someone appeal to impenetrable physics to explain the operations of the mind, flee we already have disciplines called "psychology" and "neuroscience" to handle those concerns.