دانلود کتاب توهم یقین – آنچه شما نمی دانید و چرا مهم است

In so many ways, this is a glorious time for knowledge. Best. Time. Ever. A time when much of the world has access to rigorously produced, independent, and carefully curated information on everything from our health to details about the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. There are more highly trained researchers than at any time in human history. There are more diverse voices and perspectives in the knowledge- creation mix. There is more research happening on more things. And there are more ways to access and share the knowledge produced by that research and analysis. This is all good. And it should continue to excite and amaze us. It should give us hope that we can find rational and evidence- informed answers to our problems, both big and small. Both personal and societal. Hold onto that hope. Hold it like it is a life preserver and you’ve been thrown into a cold churning sea. And know that there is a knowledgeinformed lifeline out there. Because, holy cow, that lifeline is getting tougher and tougher to grasp (though I hope this book will help!). The present reality: our information environment—that space where we seek, contribute to, and interact with the world’s knowledge—is completely and truly f*cked. It is a tangle of lies, distortions, and rage- filled rants. This has created a massive paradox: we have more access to more knowledge than ever before and, at the same time, less and less certainty about the issues that matter to us. Everybody knows this. It is a truism of our time. But it gets worse. The tools we use to navigate through the noise and to find some semblance of certainty—science and academic analysis, expert opinions, representations of consensus, and evidence- informed recommendations—are also being corrupted and twisted, often rendering them near useless. There are, for example, fewer transformative scientific discoveries happening now than in past decades, but research is hyped now more than ever. There are an increasing number of fake and poor- quality scientific journals that pollute both the academic literature and public discourse. It has become the norm to use bad science—and science-y language—to sell us bogus products, procedures, and policy agendas. Fake consumer reviews and ratings exploit our desire for authentic opinion. And even our search for clarity is manipulated by marketers using a manufactured and illusory certainty about what is healthy, needed, and good. We are adrift in a storm of information chaos, and we are tearing down the lighthouses. This is a knowledge production and distribution crisis. But what if I told you the problem wasn’t simply that our information ecosystem isn’t providing us with reliable information? What if I told you it has become rigged to promote information chaos? What if I told you it has become incentivized to deceive us? The question is: how did we get here? And much more urgently: how do we get out of this mess?