PostTruth (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

How we arrived in a posttruth era, when alternative facts replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.Are we living in a posttruth world, where alternative facts replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the posttruth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of fake news, from our psychological blind spots to the publics retreat into information silos.What, exactly, is posttruth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, boldfaced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examplesclaims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular voteand finds that posttruth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet posttruth didnt begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wiredin cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for posttruth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernismspecifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truthin its attacks on science and facts.McIntyre argues that we can fight posttruth, and that the first step in fighting posttruth is to understand it.