Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

by David Robert Grimes

Overview

Good Thinking is our best defense against anti-vaccine paranoia, climate denial, and other dire threats of today

Publisher’s Note: Good Thinking was previously published in the UK as The Irrational Ape.

In our ever-more-polarized society, there’s at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we’re not among them—are we?

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.

Grimes’s expert takedown of irrationality is required reading for anyone wondering why bad thinking persists and how we can defeat it. Ultimately, no one changes anyone else’s mind; we can only change our own–and give others the tools to do the same.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781615197934
Publisher:	The Experiment, LLC
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	165,510
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Dr. David Robert Grimes is a physicist, cancer researcher and science journalist. Born in Dublin in 1985, he is affiliated with Dublin City University and University of Oxford. He contributes to both the BBC and RTE discussing science, politics and media and has contributed to The Guardian, The Irish Times, the BBC, PBS, and The New York Times, among others. He also advises on science policy, and was joint recipient of the 2014 Nature/Sense about Science Maddox Prize for Standing Up for Science.

Table of Contents

Preface i

Prologue 1

Introduction: From Absurdity to Atrocity 7

Part 1 Without Reason Formal Fallacies and How to Defeat Them

1 An Indecent Proposition 23

Errors in Logic, Murderous Popes, and 9/11 Conspiracies

2 Stripped to the Absurd 38

The Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, 5G Panic, and Online Shaming

3 It Does Not Follow 53

Snake Oil Schemes, Cherry-Picking Psychics, and Why Anecdotes Aren't Evidence

Part 2 The Pure and Simple Truth? Spotting and Debunking Dubious Rhetoric

4 The Devil in the Details 69

Reductive Cause Fallacies, Why Vitamins Aren't Panaceas, and the Perils of False Dichotomies

5 Smoke without Fire 82

Superstitious Pigeons, Anti- Vaccine Activism, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

6 The Nature of the Beast 97

Misguided Essentialism, the Illogical Foundations of Racism, and the Trial of Galileo

7 Bait and Switch 114

The Flawed Rhetoric of Anti-Evolution Theories, Circular Reasoning, and Cannabis Quacks

Part 3 Trapdoors of the Mind The Struggle Between Reason and Belief

8 Schrodinger's Bin Laden 131

Stalin's Russia, Climate Change Denial, UFO Cults, and the Irrational World of Motivated Reasoning

9 The Memory Remains 148

Satanic Ritual Abuse, Conformity of Memory, and Why Our Recollections Are Often Contrived

10 Daggers of the Mind 161

Ghosts, Demons, Apophenia, Pareidolia, and Other Ways Our Senses Fail Us

11 Great Expectations 178

Astrology, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, Placebos, Nocebos, and the Dunning-Kruger Phenomenon

Part 4 Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics How Numbers Can Mislead Us

12 Chance Encounters 193

Bayes's Theorem, Gambling, Wrongful Convictions, and How Misunderstanding Probability Can Lead to Tragedy

13 Sifting the Signal 206

The Theranos Controversy, Cholera Outbreaks, Why Correlation Does Not Equal Causation, and Other Statistical Nightmares

14 Size Matters 219

How to Properly Assess the Strength of Evidence in Health Claims, from Absolute Risk to Statistical Significance

Part 5 News of the World How Media Indulges Bad Thinking

15 Skewing the Balance 235

How Donald Trump and Creationists Get Prime Time; False Balance and Manufactured Controversies

16 Tales from the Echo Chamber 251

AIDS Denialism, the Filter Bubble, and the Polarizing Perils of the Echo Chamber Effect

17 The Outrage Machine 265

The Sandy Hook Atrocity, Soviet Interference, and the Art of Dezinformatsiya

18 Bad Influencers 280

Celebrities, Wellness Cults, and Pseudo-Profound Bullshit

Part 6 The Candle in the Dark What Science Is and What h Is Not

19 The Edge of Science 297

Occam's Razor, Homeopathic Delusions, What Science Really Is, and How to Spot Pseudoscience

20 Rise of the Cargo Cult 314

Cargo-Cult Science, Health Fearmongering, and the FBI's Shoddy Convictions

21 A Healthy Skepticism 328

Cancer Cure Conspiracies, Chernobyl Fictions, and How Scientific Skepticism Can Save Us

Epilogue 345

References and Further Reading 365

Acknowledgments 374

Index 376

About the Author 386

Editorial Reviews

"Praise from the UK

"From anti-vaxxers to Dunning-Kruger, from homeopathy and astrology to ‘false balance’ (what I call the BBC Fallacy), from misused statistics to nuclear brinkmanship, our irrationality could be our undoing. A book exposing the irrational ape and teaching us to mend our ways might so easily have become all preachy and teachy. Instead, such is David Robert Grimes’s storytelling skill, his book is an unstoppable page-turner. If our leaders were forced to read this book, the world would be a safer place."

Richard Dawkins

"Grimes’s book addresses an all-too-urgent contemporary political question: How do we protect our societies and ourselves from charlatans and fools? . . . It brings a fresh perspective, and has been painstakingly researched. This spirited cocktail of data leavened with anecdotes is served up in Grimes’s trademark provocative, combative style . . . a highly creditable debut from a skilled communicator."

John Gibbons

"A beautifully reasoned book about our own unreasonableness."

Robin Ince

Praise from the UK
 
“From anti-vaxxers to Dunning-Kruger, from homeopathy and astrology to ‘false balance’ (what I call the BBC Fallacy), from misused statistics to nuclear brinkmanship, our irrationality could be our undoing. A book exposing the irrational ape and teaching us to mend our ways might so easily have become all preachy and teachy. Instead, such is David Robert Grimes’s storytelling skill, his book is an unstoppable page-turner. If our leaders were forced to read this book, the world would be a safer place.”—Richard Dawkins
 
“A beautifully reasoned book about our own unreasonableness.”—Robin Ince
 
“Grimes's book addresses an all-too-urgent contemporary political question: How do we protect our societies and ourselves from charlatans and fools? . . . It brings a fresh perspective, and has been painstakingly researched. This spirited cocktail of data leavened with anecdotes is served up in Grimes’s trademark provocative, combative style . . . a highly creditable debut from a skilled communicator.”—John Gibbons, Irish Times

From the Publisher