Post-Truth

Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It

Evan Davis

Having read it

★★★★★

Brilliant. Not just a good read but an insightfully great one! Everybody needs to read this book.

A good passage

The practice of lacing prose with supposed facts that actually lack meaning is but one case of a more general habit of writing text superfluous to the goal of relaying information. I would say that showing off by using complex words – even if they are correctly applied and truthfully used – is a form of bullshit. Hiding a message by diluting it in euphemistic terms is also a form of bullshit. And waffle, the addition of extra text to make it look as though your message is more substantial than it really is – well, that too is bullshit.

A second good passage

We live in a post-truth age because significant numbers of gullible people are taken in by fake news and false narratives that are put about by those who play to our disposition to believe.