Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall — The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

49 published claims from this book.

• A journalistic novelty bias misleads on probabilistic evidence topics
• A scientist’s bias does not invalidate the evidence produced
• Agreement on unrelated topics buys trust that propagandists exploit
• An honest journalist sharing only surprising results can mislead the public
• Anti-fake-news measures will be gamed once they become targets
• Anti-vaxxers exploit tight-knit migrant cliques vulnerable to conformity
• Antiarrhythmic drugs caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths
• Bayes’ rule is the unique rational way to update belief
• Beliefs with no practical stakes function as pure social identity signals
• Bridging echo chambers fails without cross-partisan trust
• Computer simulation can test hypotheses about large-scale social learning
• Concentrating research funding can make science more propaganda-proof
• Conformity prevails when false beliefs carry no personal costs to the believer
• Consensus reports need not platform credentialed contrarian views
• Deferring to authoritative sources makes one vulnerable to their weaponization
• Earmark bans may have worsened political dysfunction by nationalizing voter attention
• Enough confidence to guide action suffices; absolute certainty is not needed
• Even scientists hold nearly all scientific beliefs on testimony alone
• Even wildly unrealistic models can yield genuine insight into complex systems
• Evenhanded journalism can itself bias public scientific belief
• Evidence sharing alone drives groups toward uniform belief without conformity psychology
• Fake news outperformed reputable news in social media engagement in 2016
• False beliefs mostly persist through social transmission, not individual failings
• Fully honest scientists can still be beaten by industrial selection
• Health misinformation moved from fringe to mainstream political discourse
• History alone cannot measure the Tobacco Strategy’s causal contribution
• Independent testimonies agreeing closely can convert a skeptic into a believer
• Individually rational agents can form collectively irrational groups
• Industrial selection leaves no uncorrupted group to correct errors
• Industry can distort science simply by funding the researchers who suit it
• Industry cherry-picking is continuous with ordinary scientific publication bias
• Industry disinformation demanded impossible certainty regardless of accumulated evidence
• Less communication can yield truer scientific consensus (Zollman effect)
• Local politics resists misinformation more than national politics does
• Low-powered studies disproportionately feed industry propaganda
• Polarization similarity hides distinct causes requiring opposite interventions
• Polarized groups bundle unrelated beliefs into correlated packages
• Propagandists need not fake results, only manipulate how results are shared
• Public actions can snowball beliefs, overriding stronger private information
• Rational inference from others’ actions alone can push a whole group wrong
• Regional weather and cold cloud chemistry amplified ozone loss beyond all predictions
• Scientific discoveries emerge from communal slow accumulation, not lone genius
• Skepticism about certainty does not justify refusing to act on evidence
• Small studies more often yield spurious results a propagandist can exploit
• Social platforms are culpable for fake news but culpability is not remediation
• Source-trusting alone can split a community into stable opposing epistemic camps
• The medical debate over chronic Lyme threatens lives on both sides
• Tobacco executives publicly claimed no proof existed while privately knowing otherwise
• Training doctors caused higher maternal death rates than midwives in Vienna 1846