Friday, December 30, 2022

The Misinformation Age

The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, 2019 

I got this book out of the Canisius College Library. It was a small book but it took me awhile to get through it because I had it available to me for a long time. It wasn't like I had my usual 2 or 3 weeks e-book loan period. No matter how long it took me to read it this book was an intense and fascinating experience.

The authors are both philosophers of science and they apply scientific methods to determine the question of what we know and how we know. A lot of the book gets rather technical in their application of scientific models and they use a lot of philosophical jargon. There were times when I got bogged down in their methodology but the bottom line kept pointing out the fact that America has always been a country of fake news and alternative facts going back generations but has recently taken center stage in our national politics.

The book went into a lot of detail about various misinformation campaigns and methods of propaganda throughout our history including the ozone layer, tobacco industry, climate change, germ theory, assassination conspiracies, water fluoridation, vaccine issues and so on. 

Everything that we have been through in recent years has clearly illustrated the fact that we are in The Misinformation Age.


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