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Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
My highlights: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143746
New Yorker: Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation:
People may fervently espouse symbolic beliefs, cognitive scientists say, but they don’t treat them the same as factual beliefs. It’s worth keeping track of the difference. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/dont-believe-what-theyre-telling-you-about-misinformation
Weill isn’t the only one to fear the effects of false information. In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”
Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity...
In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philo..
