Good Thinking is our best defense against anti-vaccine paranoia, climate denial, and other dire threats of today

Publisher’s Note: Good Thinking was previously published in the UK as The Irrational Ape.

In our ever-more-polarized society, there’s at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we’re not among them—are we?

Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics–from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism. But his purpose in Good Thinking isn’t to shame or place blame. Rather, it’s to interrogate our own assumptions–to develop our eye for the glimmer of truth in a vast sea of dubious sources–in short, to think critically.

Grimes’s expert takedown of irrationality is required reading for anyone wondering why bad thinking persists and how we can defeat it. Ultimately, no one changes anyone else’s mind; we can only change our own–and give others the tools to do the same.

Praise from the UK
 
“From anti-vaxxers to Dunning-Kruger, from homeopathy and astrology to ‘false balance’ (what I call the BBC Fallacy), from misused statistics to nuclear brinkmanship, our irrationality could be our undoing. A book exposing the irrational ape and teaching us to mend our ways might so easily have become all preachy and teachy. Instead, such is David Robert Grimes’s storytelling skill, his book is an unstoppable page-turner. If our leaders were forced to read this book, the world would be a safer place.”—Richard Dawkins
 
“A beautifully reasoned book about our own unreasonableness.”—Robin Ince
 
“Grimes's book addresses an all-too-urgent contemporary political question: How do we protect our societies and ourselves from charlatans and fools? . . . It brings a fresh perspective, and has been painstakingly researched. This spirited cocktail of data leavened with anecdotes is served up in Grimes’s trademark provocative, combative style . . . a highly creditable debut from a skilled communicator.”—John Gibbons, Irish Times