Pentapod reviewed Everything Is F*cked by Mark Manson
Review of 'Everything Is F*cked' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I picked up this book because his previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, was at least an entertaining read. This book was a bit all over the place, however. It's more focused on how our perspective on the world and life is inherently biased and messing us up, and he highlights some interesting studies illustrating this fact. Some chapters are quite interesting; I particularly enjoyed chapter 6, which talks about Kant's formula of humanity and raised some really thought provoking ways of looking at the world. But then chapters 7 and 8 seemed a little rambling, and the final chapter was just utter bullshit in every possible way.
Why was the last chapter complete rubbish, you may ask? I dunno, because Manson is more interested in writing a book to make money off pop science than in actually understanding the subjects he's talking about? After the …
I picked up this book because his previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, was at least an entertaining read. This book was a bit all over the place, however. It's more focused on how our perspective on the world and life is inherently biased and messing us up, and he highlights some interesting studies illustrating this fact. Some chapters are quite interesting; I particularly enjoyed chapter 6, which talks about Kant's formula of humanity and raised some really thought provoking ways of looking at the world. But then chapters 7 and 8 seemed a little rambling, and the final chapter was just utter bullshit in every possible way.
Why was the last chapter complete rubbish, you may ask? I dunno, because Manson is more interested in writing a book to make money off pop science than in actually understanding the subjects he's talking about? After the rest of the book covers all sorts of thoughts about human nature, philosophy, the state of the world, and so on, Manson tries to wrap it all up in a chapter predicting the future of humanity, literally called "The Final Religion". To do this he brings in Artificial Intelligence, and claims that AI controlling our lives in every way is our future. Somehow he tries to support this theory via evolution, which he claims the humans are the pinnacle of evolution because we are the only creature that can process information best.
Now, I may not be an expert on AI, but I have two degrees in biology and I can definitively say that based on what Manson writes in this chapter, he doesn't have the foggiest understanding of how evolution actually works, and pretty much everything he's claiming here about it makes no sense whatsoever. So I can only assume that if his grasp of AI is as tenuous as his grasp of evolution (and even in my limited understanding of AI I'm pretty sure that's the case), he's talking utter bullshit throughout this entire chapter. Like, I don't need to be an expert on AI to notice that he didn't even touch on the inherent biases that all AI systems have inherited from their programmers, and that seems like a pretty damn huge flaw that should be addressed before claiming they will solve all our problems and become our new gods. Ugh. I don't have enough words to describe how utterly stupid and ignorant this last chapter is.
So ... do not recommend the book, despite the fact some of the other chapters were quite interesting. If you do read it, I highly suggest you just stop before chapter 9 and pretend the book ended there.
