Vi Hart’s Internet Votes (written 2015, published 2017):

On the internet, content rises to the top if it wins the popular vote. But unlike modern implementations of democracy, you get as many votes as you have time to give, all day every day, and most of those votes are taken by web companies without asking. And unlike the popular vote in democracy,

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.

Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes (2010) “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit” http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/09/sceptical-rule-of-thumb.html

Confirmation Bias: Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don’t want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates.

Truth Sandwich (George Lakeoff, 2018?): trying to refute an idea can spread it, because your audience is probably not the audience that was first exposed. Another name is prebunking (but committing publicly to a position on something has dangers: if you turn out to be wrong, it will be harder to admit that).

Books Feed Books: often this how-to book retells that how-to book even if no skilled worker actually does it that way. If there are 10 books on a topic, someone will probably write the eleventh because there is clearly an interest and they have models to follow.

Incorrect Premises: many people’s beliefs about the past are rooted in false assumptions, such as assuming that riding a horse was as convenient as driving a car or of course there were nonpartisan, impersonal courts following formal procedures with jurisdiction over everyone or obviously everyone was either superstitious and ignorant or a liberal