Detecting deception : tools to fight fake news
(Book)

Preface: detecting deception and why it matters

Section 1: Distractions and deceptions. The personal attack: "We shouldn't listen to dummies" ; Poisoning the well: "Nothing to see here" ; The straw man: "Said no one ever" ; The appeal to hypocrisy: "She did it first!" ; The red herring: "Look! Squirrel!" ; The black and white: "There are only two things that could happen" ; The slippery slope: "And you'll end up living in a van by the river" ; The fallacy of fallacies: "One rotten apple spoils the grocery store" ; The faulty analogy: "Comparing oranges to falsehoods" ; The irrelevant conclusion: "Cool. Don't care" ; The hasty generalization: "I saw a thing once" ; The division fallacy: "All the children are above average" ; The composition fallacy: "Great players must make a great band" ; Begging the question: "The blue sky is blue" ; The appeal to purity: "Real men don't eat haggis" ; Equivocation: "I mean, I am nice" ; The sunk cost: "We've already invested so much"

Section 2: Unrelated evidence. The appeal to pity: "If you really cared about me" ; The appeal to force: "Agree-or else" ; The appeal to ignorance: "No one has proved you can't" ; The appeal to authority: "I'm not a doctor but . . ." ; The appeal to tradition: "We've always done it this way" ; The appeal to popularity: "A lot of people agree" ; The big lie and conspiracy theories: "The sky is green. The sky is green. The sky is green"

Section 3: Issues with numbers and data. Ignoring the base rate: "100 percent of people die" ; The false cause: "Spider bites and spelling bees" ; The hidden variable: "Rabbit feet and lucky rocks" ; Unnecessary precision: "The difference that doesn't matter" ; Naive probability and the audience it confuses: "This slot machine is hot" ; Deception with charts: "A picture is worth 1,000 lies" ; Misrepresenting polls and surveys: "four out of five dentists surveyed agree".