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leifalreadyexists 's review for:
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
by James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O'Connor
Jeez. They really, really want to be good at this, and they are! After the initial joy of an old-fashioned round of "everyone is stupid and look how long people believed in this crazy vegetable lamb", unfortunately, Misinformation Age finds itself with more misses than hits, at least for me. Starting from a counter-intuitive (scientists believe crap things) is good, and moving through the ways in which supposedly rational, self-interested yada yada people misinform and mis-believe themselves into dumb conformity was okay, but really I didn't have much time for this until the authors began to investigate what I would call (but they do not) power. Using many examples of industrial influence, ideological bias, and selection issues, among other factors, O'Connor and Weatherall actually make the case for a wildly less hopeful world regarding the distribution of information and facts than presently exists, which is both exactly right and yet oddly airless in their strangely deracinated world of scientists, who have complex lives and thoughts, and the policymakers, politicians, propagandists, and publics, all of whom have what appear to be relatively simple lives in comparison to the much-valorized scientists.
The authors do not do themselves credit when they prescribe clear but laughably simplistic roles for these many different kinds of actors, none of whose own literatures are cited (save, perhaps, for the origins of the propagandists, but certainly there is no discussion of MBA-speak, which is the public relations of the day quite literally). What do policy professionals think? One will never know, if reading Misinformation Age, but one will have a definite opinion of what they should do. If I am not making myself clear enough, I think this is way too simple of a story, despite (because of, perhaps) the ratio-cratic use of modeling to describe misinformation through the various chapters.
That said, through the careful use of micro-case studies, O'Connor and Weatherall bring many of their ideas to life, and I did find the writing eminently accessible and the prose clean and lovely. There is much to enjoy here!
It wasn't until the final chapter and really the last pages that I became infuriated, however. Without realistic solutions, bromides are proferred around - and that all felt very facile and yet predictable. Yet the gall of prescribing a rethink of democracy without having the courage to ever say the word "capitalism" was more than disappointing - it is devastating. It means that whatever the authors think, their liberal politics have backed them into a corner and blindfolded them, and only by an absolutely incredible and delicate use of their well-trained nose can they tell that paint surrounds them and that any attempt to leave their enclosure is to be met with disturbance, mess, and even radical change.
So. A very frustrating book with a hard kernel of liberal politics but a thick skin of philosophical care surrounding it. Read it from the library - even flawed, it has something to offer many people.
The authors do not do themselves credit when they prescribe clear but laughably simplistic roles for these many different kinds of actors, none of whose own literatures are cited (save, perhaps, for the origins of the propagandists, but certainly there is no discussion of MBA-speak, which is the public relations of the day quite literally). What do policy professionals think? One will never know, if reading Misinformation Age, but one will have a definite opinion of what they should do. If I am not making myself clear enough, I think this is way too simple of a story, despite (because of, perhaps) the ratio-cratic use of modeling to describe misinformation through the various chapters.
That said, through the careful use of micro-case studies, O'Connor and Weatherall bring many of their ideas to life, and I did find the writing eminently accessible and the prose clean and lovely. There is much to enjoy here!
It wasn't until the final chapter and really the last pages that I became infuriated, however. Without realistic solutions, bromides are proferred around - and that all felt very facile and yet predictable. Yet the gall of prescribing a rethink of democracy without having the courage to ever say the word "capitalism" was more than disappointing - it is devastating. It means that whatever the authors think, their liberal politics have backed them into a corner and blindfolded them, and only by an absolutely incredible and delicate use of their well-trained nose can they tell that paint surrounds them and that any attempt to leave their enclosure is to be met with disturbance, mess, and even radical change.
So. A very frustrating book with a hard kernel of liberal politics but a thick skin of philosophical care surrounding it. Read it from the library - even flawed, it has something to offer many people.