Lies and misinformation proliferate in our age.

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Book Review

Learn and graduate to think critically in the curse of the often misinformation age.

“Its not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, its what you know for sure that just aint so.”  Mark Twain.

We have failed to learn better and teach our children to fight the evolutionary tendency toward gullibility. In this day and age misinformation has proliferated exponentially with daily claims about this or that camouflaged in facts that are often twisted in clever ways. We must all learn to become ever more critical thinkers..  The lies will win if we are gullible and untrained in detecting them. These can weaponize to produce social, economic and political ends.  

I know some odd guy which gets most of his information through YouTube, thinking its wisdom when so much is just nonsense, or more like cleverly disguised mis-information to fit a narrative.  If somebody emails you a link to some short video or interesting story one should always ask where does it come from and why is it credible, if not don’t waste your time.

Here are some interesting quotes from a great book which many of us should read so to be better equipped to detect galling and disguised misinformation or outright lies, which is hitting us from all sides almost daily.  Misinformation has proliferated in our age and times:

-Misinformation is the curse of the information age.

-Lies proliferate in our culture and internet age.

-The word of the year in 2016 was “post truth”.

-There are not 2 sides of every story when one is a lie.

-Everyone of course is entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts, often a contradiction of them.

-We have created more human made information in the past 5 years then in all of human history.

From the excellent book Weaponized Lies: How to think critically in the post -truth area. By Daniel Levitin. (2017)

Best Regards,

Paul A. Renaud.
www.thaistocks.com