Post-Truth (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

In an era of post-truth, we must challenge each and every attempt to obfuscate a factual matter and challenge falsehoods before they are allowed to fester.

Post-truth is not about reality; it is about the way that humans react to reality. Once we are aware of our cognitive biases, we are in a better position to subvert them.

One of the barriers to critical thinking is bathing in a constant stream of confirmation bias.

The point of challenging a lie is not to convince the liar, who is likely too far gone in his or her dark purpose to be rehabilitated. But because every lie has an audience, there may still be time to do some good for others.

As Manjoo’s subtitle asks: can we learn to live in a post-fact society? I, for one, do not want to. The issue for me is not to learn how to adjust to living in a world in which facts do not matter, but instead to stand up for the notion of truth and learn how to fight back.

Here we arrive at the second thesis of postmodernism: that any profession of truth is nothing more than a reflection of the political ideology of the person who is making it.

Think of this as the first thesis of postmodernism: there is no such thing as objective truth.

The lesson here is that one must always fight back against lies. We should never assume that any claim is “too outrageous to be believed.”

Daniel J. Levitin entitled Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era (previously published under the title A Field Guide to Lies, but retitled after the post-truth craze).