Your Best Year Ever - Michael Hyatt

 I guess this would be a good book for a neurotypical new adult? I'm not even sure.  Maybe for people searching for some sort of justification to get rolling? The major take-home idea of the book is do 1 little thing to get started.  You will feel you've accomplished something and that will give you the dopamine dump and moral boost to take step 2, probably one that's a little harder.  Frankly, I have no idea what this guy is talking about because when you accomplish the first simple task, like organizing or putting your name at the top of the paper, you still have to keep going and I think he's full of it regarding any positive feelings from finishing the easy part first.  The same difficult task you weren't excited about is still before you and it seems like you have a great excuse to say, "Alright, I got one thing done. That's enough for today." to just keep putting off the stuff you actually needed to do.  I think he's full of it and don't recommend this book at all.

Chariots Of The Gods - Erich Von Daniken

 So I knew going in that this would be ridiculous, but I was still unprepared for the white supremacy/colonizer racism.  I did not expect that.  And it was so casually thrown in too.  I must chalk it up to "back in my day" phrasing but it was just so short-sighted and ill placed that it made the author look even dumber than he already did.  Allow me to explain; I'll have to start at the beginning of this silly book.

The premise is that ancient man could in no way have built, mapped, calculated, guessed, or understood so much of the knowledge to come out prior to .... the enlightenment period? Or maybe the renaissance period? Basically, anything before white people came onto the intellectual scene.  And the only other possible explaination for this is that humans were routinely visited by an advanced alien civilization that gave them maps, math, technology, insight, new philisophical ideas, etc.  Pretty much any impressive feat ancient people accomplished could show evidence of this interaction.  

My approach to deciding what is true often reverts to "what is the most likely answer" barring some strong evidence.  It pretty much kills most conspiracy theories.  So in the case of this book, sure it's possible these advancements and ideas could come from aliens, but is that the most likely answer? No.  This book relies on poor understanding of technology and civilizations at this time coupled with the assumption that ancient people were not very smart.  They would have used every trick they knew at the time and just because there isn't a continuous line of this knowledge doesn't mean people didn't once have it.  Europeans lost the knowledge of iron production and ripped it out of the colusseum in Rome.  In a pre-historic peoples, this loss of knowledge seems even more likely to occur.  So which scenario is more likely? Aliens helped/built stone henge because ancient people were to stupid to figure out where the sun would rise/set and couldn't work together enough to haul giant stones that far.  Or they did just that. Sure there's the argument that there weren't many good, straight trees around for rolling the stones on and those pullies would have been massive and difficult to work, and it all would have been very dangerous, but is aliens the more likely anwer?

Another example is the carved heads on pacific islands.  The author argues that these have features this genetically narrow group of people wouldn't have seen like narrow noses and thin lips.  But what the author is really arguing is that these people spending hours, days, months? carving stones wouldn't want to change it up.  There is no way they didn't make the faces thinner, thicker, fatter, skinnier, big-eyed, squiny eyed, heavy browed, or all the other variations to the human face just to make each unique.  It doesn't mean they had some mysterious contact with other people.  Any group is going to have natural variation and even if the carvings have greater variation than seen in the local population, just go look at some anime to see people don't really draw/create their art in exact copies of the world around them.  The author really shows his colonizer attitude in thinking that these people couldn't have "come up" with variations in features.  Again, which is more likely: people taking artistic license or aliens?

He brings up the Nazca lines as obvious evidence that ancient peoples were drawing art/trying to guide/wanting to please aliens coming from the sky.  However, the author seems to totally forget that many of the oldest religions were based on sun/moon worship.  The "god in the sky" concept is incredibly old and huge endeavors for a god above is not unheard of either.  So which is more likely: people continuing the "god is above" concept as created by man, or visiting aliens?

Honestly, the bible has the most convincing evidence with the balls-tripping description of "angels" that really do sound like badly translated descriptions of space ships.  I'll give him that.  But time has taught me to be incrediblly skeptical of taking any of the old testament and most of the new at face value.  I can name multiple mistranslations right off the top of my head.  The most interesting point of this argument is how the same stories crop up across the globe.  But again, is the more likely answer that these stories pre-date people leaving Africa and carrying the stories with them, or aliens?

These are just a very few well-known examples.  While in the process of reading this book, I could immediately think of more likley reasons for these "phenomena" than the answer the author offered.  It was like a bizarre fall into non-logic-land.  If anyone is interested in the psychology of conspiracy theories and why/how people get wrapped up in them, this is a good excercise in observing the failure of deduction, while being easily thought around with a second's worth of consideration. I have sitting on my counter right now Carl Sagan's Demon haunted world which I know has a small chapter on aliens and I'm super excited to read it to compare notes from this book.