The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

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However, this is a very valuable book and the timing could not be better. Social media and the internet are awash with information and claims about the dangers of vaccination, fluoridation, nuclear power, GM foods, 5G and a host of other things. Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics–from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism. But his purpose in Good Thinking isn’t to shame or place blame. Rather, it’s to interrogate our own assumptions–to develop our eye for the glimmer of truth in a vast sea of dubious sources–in short, to think critically . Good Thinking is our best defense against anti-vaccine paranoia, climate denial, and other dire threats of today

The conclusion here is inferred from a statement when there are no grounds to do so. There are myriad reasons an innocent person might not defend themselves. Perhaps they’re protecting someone or refusing to recognise a corrupt court. Perhaps they’re simply exceptionally dead, as was the case with Formosus. This logical fallacy is denying the antecedent, or the inverse error. Just because X implies Y (‘an innocent man would defend himself’), it is mistaken to assume the absence of X implies the absence of Y (‘Formosus did not defend himself, thus he is guilty’). Despite a superficial logical veneer, it is intrinsically flawed. Greek scholars demonstrated the perils of the inverse error in antiquity, but that hasn’t stopped it being dubiously employed in subsequent centuries by those who should know better, as Pope Stephen exemplified. On the one hand, this book provides a fascinating discussion on why so many people are drawn to ineffective alternative medicines, climate change denial and contentious conspiracy theories. The book is bursting with anecdotes which add colour to the scientific discussion and provide little pearls of wisdom to collect. Further, the author disaggregates the diverse iterations of 'uncritical thinking'. This enables him to clearly deconstruct their underlying causes, outline the social and personal ramifications of their proliferation, and provide a humbling reminder that whilst we may be less susceptible to certain kinds of cognitive biases, we may be more vulnerable to the influence of others. The other way the author seeks to make this an enjoyable and readable work is to include many anecdotes illustrating his points. These are especially powerful when they are anecdotes based on his own experience. For instance, the section on anti vaccine activists and the HPV vaccine contains a very powerful and emotional story of Laura Brennan's fight against the anti-vaxers before she died last year - because she had not had the HPV vaccine. Scientific journals are much less likely to deem negative results worth publishing, which places researchers under immense pressure to find links between phenomena at the risk of these links being spurious....It is far more useful to know that a drug doesn't work, for example, than to be presented with incorrect assertions that it does." I thought the explanation of model evaluation needed more work. (I knew the topic and still had trouble following the explanation.)If one in 10,000 suffer from an illness, and the test is 99.99 per cent accurate – what are the odds that a positive result means one has the disease? We live in a time in which we are plagued with information. I'd love to use a word other than "plagued" to describe it, but the reality is that much of the information we consume is just not reliable. It's m I really wanted to give this book one star but the guy makes a bit of sense so hence the two star rating. It turns out that insects, rather than grain, were the sparrows’ staple diet. Within a year, grain harvests were devastated by exploding swarms of locusts. Over the next three years, between 15 and 45 million Chinese people had starved to death as a result of the ensuing famine.

Essential reading about our irrational minds for post-truth society. This book covers conspiracy, disinformation and propaganda using various real-life stories from 9/11 truth seekers to climate change denialists and various methods of information filtering from unbalanced newspaper coverage to polarised social networks. There's nothing new or groundbreaking here, but Follow evidence, think critically is an important message that can't be repeated too often. Grimes covers:

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In The Irrational Ape, Dr. David Robert Grimes shows how easy it is to be lured into making critical mistakes or drawing false conclusions, and how to avoid such errors. We may not have to save the planet from nuclear annihilation, of course, but our ability to think critically has never been more important. In a world where fake news, mistrust of experts, prejudice and ignorance all too often hold sway, we can all too easily be misled. Access to all the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, yet that also means misinformation and falsehoods can perpetuate further and faster than ever before. From healthcare to geo-politics, no subject is immune to the assertions of the misguided or the malicious, with detrimental consequences for all of us. In an era where we are constantly bombarded with misinformation, skewed logic, devious rhetoric, and our own psychological biases can leave us less informed, and more divided.

Strange as it sounds, the medieval papacy was a hive of political intrigue worthy of George R. R. Martin. But even by the bizarre standards of early Vatican intrigue, few episodes in the history of the Catholic Church are quite as strange as the dramatic events of January 897. The setting was the courtroom in the magnificent Archbasilica of St John Lateran, where the newly anointed Pope Stephen VI thundered accusations of perjury, corruption and sin at his predecessor, Pope Formosus. Yet, despite the animated tirade, Formosus reacted with stony silence to the litany of abuses levelled against him. This silence was perhaps unsurprising; Formosus had in fact been dead a full eight months before the trial even began. To take one persistent canard, it is true that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams. It is essentially kerosene, burning at approximately 815°C, whereas steel’s melting point is around 1,510°C. Yet, while 9/11 truthers clutch to this factlet with religious fervour, it simply highlights a profound misunderstanding of basic mechanics: steel rapidly loses its tensile strength with temperature. At 590°C, it diminishes to 50 per cent normal strength. At the temperatures in the Twin Towers, it would have decreased to roughly 10 per cent of normal. In this hellish crucible, the structure was simply too weakened to endure. This, coupled with the massive structural damage, was the catalyst that let floor collapse upon adjacent floor, an effect known as ‘pancaking’, the destruction multiplying with each level consumed. Steel didn’t have to melt to cause the tower’s demise – it merely had to fail, a finding constantly reiterated by engineers and professional bodies. We may not have to save the planet from nuclear annihilation, of course, but our ability to think critically has never been more important . In a world where fake news , mistrust of experts , prejudice and ignorance all too often hold sway, we can all too easily be misled over issues such as vaccinations , climate change or conspiracy theories . We live in an era where access to all the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, yet that also means misinformation and falsehoods can spread further and faster than ever before.

Table of Contents

Good Thinking” by Grimes, an Irish physicist, cancer researcher and science journalist, is an easy-to-read explanation of common sources of bias, logical fallacies and motivated reasoning, fallacies of argument and devious rhetorical techniques, conspiracy theories and related tribal thinking, misuse of statistics, the Dunning-Kruger effect, limits of our senses and of memory, false equivalency, “cargo cult science”, and the harmful role of social and mass media, among other things. And he points out that these problems are hardly new in our society. It’s just that social media have exacerbated them. I thought the author was an equal-opportunity criticizer, politically, although it’s almost impossible to talk about conspiracy theories without bringing in people who are associated with the “right wing” in this country. To his credit, he does come up with several "left" examples as well. Why are topics like climate change and vaccination still so contentious in the public mind, when the scientific evidence is so clear?