If you get very deep into sci-fi — especially if you’re an INTJ — eventually you’re going to start getting that itchy-brain sensation where your mind starts going a million miles an hour, your neurons kick into overdrive, you start trying to grasp concepts you’ve got little background for understanding until you finally break down and say “is this really possible or is it a load of complete and utter horseshit?” Your intuition (N) will kick in and tell you most of the time but sometimes your thinking (T) will say “uh, wait, sometimes the counter-intuitive is actually true” and when that particular mind-screw happens the phenomenon of dog-chasing-its-own-tail-ad-infinitum-ad-absurdum really goes into overdrive and…well…if you’re anything like me, you prove that it is possible to go two weeks without sleeping and five days without eating (you live on the staples of your best friends C8H10N4O2 and C10H14N2) until you get enough of a grounding in the subject to determine that yes, it is possible or no, it’s not. Then you crash like Windows 3.1 encountering the Internet.
However, not everyone has the finely-tuned, well-used BS detector that comes built-in to the NT’s brain. Which is why God/Buddha/Fate/the Universe/the Flying Spaghetti Monster/Vectron/Zarqon/*insert whatever here* sent us Carl Sagan who wrote A Demon-Haunted World
This book is also great for us INTJs and other NTs/Rationals/Analysts because it can help us to understand why so many people get taken in by fads, hoaxes, things that are too-good-to-be-true, tricksters, half-truths, or other things of that nature (crop circles, UFO stories, alien abductions, the Satanic cult scare of the 1980s). And, believe me, if there’s one area where we fail epically, it’s in understanding why other people don’t get what we get so quickly and easily. I mean, for us, it’s normal to be able to figure out that there was no way that the crop circles were anything other than man-made, that Nessy was a trick of photography, that Bigfoot is a myth, that the pyramids really were an Egyptian engineering feat (and Stonehenge was the same for the Britons), that there was a natural explanation for the “canals” on Mars, etc, etc, etc. We’re hard-wired to be skeptics. Having better-than-average recall is an inborn ability for us. Learning new things is just what we do. But for the other 99% of the world, reality is totally different and we have a hard time getting that. We have a hard time walking in their shoes and this book can help us see things from their point of view.
Five rainbow-farting zebricorns. Everyone needs this book in their library and should read it at least once a year. If they did, the world would be a much better, more rational place.
— G.K.
