Richard Wilson's blog

From The Herald

Getting more clued up requires understanding why it is we are so frequently fooled. To do this, we need to learn not only about faulty logic, but our psychological weaknesses. For example, we tend to be too impressed by the mere volume of evidence marshalled in support of a case. But no amount of bad evidence adds up to good evidence. Nor should we forget that the size of even a good dossier of evidence can only be judged to be impressive or insufficient when it is compared to the size and contents of the dossier against.

There are signs that people are already equipping themselves to cope with the information tsunami. Between starting to write my own contribution – a book on bad arguments and rhetoric – and it coming out, I’ve noticed other books have also appeared with similar agendas, such as Damian Thompson’s Counterknowledge and Richard Wilson’s Don’t Be Fooled Again.

I’m hopeful that the information overload might be provoking a long-overdue upgrading of the general population’s capacity to distinguish for itself between good and bad arguments. Rather than blaming the internet, we need to attribute responsibility to the right place, which is with people who dish out the falsehoods in the first place, and ourselves for swallowing them too easily.

Julian Baggini‘s latest book is The Duck that Won the Lottery and 99 Other Bad Arguments (Granta).