The Misinformation Age

How False Beliefs Spread

By: Cailin O’Connor, James Owen Weatherall

Narrated by: Chelsea Stephens

Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

The social dynamics of "alternative facts": why what you believe depends on who you know

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O'Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there's an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that's right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not?

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

©2019 Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall (P)2019 Tantor

Stunningly good and important

Stunningly good and important book. Concise and very well done. Highly recommended. Worth reading if you are interested in the problems of propaganda, fake news, and how science can be mischaracterized.

Essential Reading for the 21st Century

This was a fantastic book that made complicated statistical subjects easily accessible to people who might not be familiar with statistics.

I consider this book a must read for anyone who engaged with social media or had an interest in how misinformation and propaganda works in the modern era. This book should honestly be taught to all high school and college students, I view it as that essentially.

Veritas!

Professors O’Connor and Weatherall make clear that we are all influenced by the people in our network. No matter how rational we consider ourselves to be, false beliefs inevitably creep in from the people we trust. It is nearly impossible for any of us to fully scrutinize the information we consume.

But there is hope. My big takeaway from this book is that we are much more likely to have true beliefs if the primary sources of information are carefully calibrated to the scientific community.

Another big takeaway is that it is much easier to change a person’s view if you share their core values and are trusted by them.

Conformity bias and social cost is also important to understand when trying to change another persons view. Most people naturally conform to the views of their social circles. To break from those most closely held views could come at the cost of the loss of friends and even family members. Hence, many people will choose to hold on to false beliefs for the sake of conforming to the views of their friends and family members and those is their social media networks.

Great book and highly recommended.

Essential book

Very informative book on current state of misinformation and why it’s unlikely to resolve itself. Also recommend Merchants of Doubt and The Chaos Machine for thorough coverage of this topic.

Helpful and insightful

Overall I liked this book. It’s themes were well laid out and easy to understand. I thought the examples were great and helped demonstrate the authors’ points. It was great all the way up to the last 5 minutes when, offering solutions, they proposed some radical ideas that, if enough time has been spent in details there, could have come across more credible.

However, I would recommend this book as it does get to the point of how and why misinformation starts and spreads and how we need to hold society accountable.

Contradictory - at best

Setting the authors' obvious agenda aside, their arguments are circular at best. They claim that the truth is hard to come by and people who want to, can manipulate it easily. Then they claim to know many truths. They claim and give examples that the majority can be wrong, but then advocate for rules protecting the majority and silencing dissent. They claim to not want to limit free speech, but then advocate for rules that do exactly that (they conveniently change the definition of what they don't like to be not-speech, therefore speech isn't limited). What they mean by is that THEY know the truth and want to censor opposing views. Because any view not in agreement with them is obviously propaganda and a danger to the public good. For people who rail against Russian influence, their dream society has a real similarity to it.

Having said all that, the information is good. I have a much better understanding of how outside actors (including the authors) try to manipulate me.

superfluous, fluff plus a leftist bias

Although full of interesting factoids, I find this book kind of superfluous. It could have been condensed to 1/3 the length, The thesis? "This time, however, the propagandist can do only one thing: dole out research money. The propagandist finds the scientist whose methods are most favorable for the theory they wish to promote and gives that scientist enough money to increase his or her productivity. This does two things. It floods the scientific community with results favorable to action A, changing the minds of many other scientists. And it also makes it more likely that new labs use the methods that are more likely to favor action A, which is better for industry [or politicized] interests. This is because researchers who are receiving lots of funding and producing lots of papers will tend to place more students in positions of influence. Over time, more and more scientists end up favoring action A over action B, even though action B is objectively superior.". Plus, a leftist bias surfacing regularly (EG it's Al Gore 100% all the way). They are crazy:"We think the interventions most likely to succeed involve radical and unlikely changes, such as the development of new regulatory frameworks to penalize the intentional creation and distribution of fake news, similar to laws recently adopted in Germany to control hate speech on social media". What?! So who sends the GESTAPO to whom, really?!