McIntyre, L. (2018)

McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-Truth. MIT Press.

(xiii) „The „other side” of the post-truth debate does not consist of people who defend it [truth] – or think that post-truth is a good thing – but those who deny that a problem even exists.”

(7) “As a first step, it is important to acknowledge that we sometimes make mistakes and say things that are untrue without meaning to do so. In that case, one is uttering a “falsehood,” as opposed to a lie, for the mistake is not intentional. The next step beyond this is “willful ignorance.” which is when we do not really know whether something is true, but we say it anyway, without bothering to take the time to find out whether our information is correct. In this / case, we might justifiably blame the speaker... Next comes lying, when we tell a falsehood with the intent to deceive.”

(9) “In its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie.”

(11) [Ideologues] “routinely embrace an obscenely high standard of doubt toward facts they don’t want to believe, alongside complete credulity toward any facts that fit with their agenda. Their main criterion is what favors their agenda.”

(13)”... post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not. And this is a recipe for political domination.”

(24) Strategy. “Find and fund your own experts, use this to suggest to the media that there are two sides to the story, push your side through public relations and governmental / lobbying, and capitalize on the resulting public confusion to question whether scientific result you wish to dispute.”

(33) Climate change debate. “The media were by now well trained to reflexively present “both sides of the story” on any “controversial” scientific issue. As a result, the public remains confused.”

(33) “Apparently one does not even have to hide one’s strategy anymore.”

(35) Roots of post-truth. Cognitive bias. (36) Leon Festinger: A theory of cognitive dissonance. 1957. (39) Peer pressure. Solomon Asch: Opinions and social pressure. 1955. (40) Peter Cathcart Wason: On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. 1960. (48) The backfire effect. Brendan Nyhan & Jason Reifler.

(51) Antidote. David Redlawsk et al.: The affective tipping point. “...even the strongest partisans will eventually reach a “tipping point” and change their beliefs after they are continually exposed to corrective evidence.”

(63) George Orwell. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

(74) “Satirists rip away the pretenses of journalism to reveal what they believe to be true. Fake news sites use the pretenses of journalism to spread what they know to be false.”

(75/ 77) “... since the traditional media could not accept the ide that they were actually biased toward the left, they resolved to show that they really could be “fair and balanced” in their coverage, so they started to report both sides of any controversial issues.”

(77) Strategy. “All they have to do is bully the media into believing that if “other research” exists on scientific topics but they aren’t covering it, it must be because they are biased.”

(104) “The Internet makes it so easy (and cheap) to get news that we have gotten lazy. Our feeling of entitlement has eroded our critical thinking skills.”

(113) Jason Stanley. “... the goal of propaganda is to build alliance. The point is not to communicate information but to get us to “pick a team.””

(116) “Who needs censorship if the truth can be buried under a pile of bullshit? And isn’t this precisely what the issue of post-truth is all about: That truth doesn’t matter as much as feelings? That we can’t even tell anymore what is true and what is not?”

(119) “According to Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the fact-checking website Snopes, “pinching of fake news isn’t the answer. The answer is flooding it with actual news.”

(120) How to reason well. Daniel Levitin: Weaponized lies: how to think critically in the post-truth era.

(139) “It could not be clearer that postmodernist thought had an influence on ID [intelligent design] theory.”

(150) “Thus is postmodernism the godfather of post-truth.”

(155) “We must always fight back against lies. We should never assume that any claim is “too outrageous to be believed.””

(157) “... even in an era of partisan bloviating and noisy “skepticism,” the facts about reality can only be denied for so long.”

(158) “... repetition of true facts does eventually have an effect.”

(162) “... information provided in graphical form was more convincing than narratives.”

(163) “There is no such thing as liberal science or conservative science. When we ask an empirical question, what should count most is the evidence.”

(172) “The truth still matters, as it always has. Whether we realize this in time is up to us.”