The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

Reviews

Gary B.

As Dr Grimes points out, the Internet has a lot to answer for: "The Internet has put the entirety of the world's information at our very fingertips. In a nutshell, the book is an inoculation against fake news and misinformation.

Surprisingly, Dr Grimes does not give up on such people and details how it is possible for anyone to overcome their own inherent irrationality with a little training. I am convinced that the world would be a better place if more people applied this checklist to their daily lives before just automatically accepting a claim as true. And often people lack the requisite skills to differentiate between reliable sources and those of dubious merit. It will help you make better decisions in life.

On this journey you will certainly learn a great deal too. One might glibly think that critical thinking is not particularly important. After reading The Irrational Ape, the reader will emerge much more educated in how to think critically and to avoid being swayed by dodgy claims.

To my mind, these appear to be blatant attempts to discredit the review section on Amazon just because they don't happen to agree with Dr Grimes' view of the world. A book review is, by definition, an opinion.

Yeah. ".

But this same freedom also allows dubious information to propagate at dizzying speeds. Some of the footnotes in the book are genuinely hilarious. Thankfully, using skills outlined and encouraged throughout the book it's relatively easy to scrutinise these negative reviews and understand the motivations of the people making them - they are anti-science and have their own agendas, prejudices and misconceptions about his intentions. The whole book is geared towards helping the reader achieve this and not to be misled by the ubiquity of misinformation in today's information age.

Perhaps you remember before the Internet that people thought that the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information. Dr Grimes writing style is charming and personable, holding the readers' hand to help them navigate through the misinformation and conspiracy thinking of the modern world. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.