Path to Misbelief

Anyone considering purchasing or reading this book should read this New Yorker article about Dan Ariely's thoroughly documented habit of lying first: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie.

This author has been repeatedly shown to have manipulated and outright fabricated data for his papers, including for more than one study about lying.

While he starts this book with a sympathetic account of his experience being made a figure in right-wing, Covid-19 related conspiracy theories, and indeed there are many lies about him to be found around the internet, it remains the case that he has accumulated a record of real, credible, very hard to refute accusations of lying about important things, without regard for the impact of these lies on the public, on politics, on innocent graduate students, or on the scientific endeavor as a whole.

Furthermore, the book does not appear to cover any new ground as far as this topic goes. It's an important topic, but it's been covered extensively by far more credible authors.

This book also takes a firmly neoliberal perspective on the topic, placing the blame on individuals rather than on systems, and making much of how "both sides" of the political spectrum succumb to misbelief. He goes on about how terrible it is that people have "lost trust" in institutions, as if that loss of trust is the root problem, and without acknowledging that these institutions often are untrustworthy or the many and varied ways they have failed and continue to fail people. And while it's true that there are conspiracy theories on the left - anti-vaxxers and so on - Ariely claims the distribution is equal across the political spectrum. He includes a graph very early on in which he shows a cherry-picked array of conspiracy theories, with unclearly labeled axis, supposed to show which conspiracy theories are more strongly held by which side of the left-right political spectrum binary, and including such items as "effort to stop the post office from processing mail-in ballots", "Russia manipulates U.S. politics" and "the GOP steals elections" on the left side. One can argue the terminology, but I think calling these "misbeliefs", aka the word Dan Ariely says he is using just because he wanted to avoid the stigma of "conspiracy theories", is stretching it at best, and he lumps them in with much wilder ideas (e.g. the world is lead by a cabal of evil pedophiles, and so on) as if they are equivalent so that he can show his perfectly balanced "both sides do this equally actually" graph. Ariely even deploys an anecdote about Russia (drumroll..). attempting to manipulate U.S. politics shortly after showing this graph.

The fact that he begins the book by coining a snappy buzzword - misbelief - is rather a red flag when it comes to these sorts of books, too. As is the fact that much of the book is a collection of anecdotes. It's the same-old, same-old playbook of these pop-sci "this one weird trick will fix everything while conveniently never inconveniencing those currently in power" behavioral economics guru books, this time from someone who has repeatedly, literally made up data for his papers. You can't trust any anecdote or data point or study account in this book.

And to be honest, in light of his currently being embroiled in scandal about his habitually producing disinformation in the form of manipulated or outright invented study results, his writing a book about conspiracy theories, beginning with a long intro (whose title claims even those who don't usually read intros should read it) bemoaning the lies people tell about him, kinda just feels like a setup to frame his credible accusers as "misbelievers" too. Or at best, perhaps writing this book is just a continuation of his apparent fascination with lying that presumably stems from the fact that he, himself, lies. See: the scientific papers about lying that he's made-up data for.

Shame on the publisher for publishing this anyway, as they absolutely knew about all this. Though it's not surprising - these sorts of popsci books are never fact checked by publishers.

It's not worth your time.