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Podcast: New Books in Communications
Episode: Neil Levy, "Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Description: Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to believe from what is not? Why are so many of us vulnerable to believing in ways that are unresponsive to widely available evidence – in other words, to holding bad beliefs? In Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People (Oxford UP, 2021), Neil Levy argues that we are in fact acting rationally, in accordance with how we have evolved to defer to our peers and authorities in our socia...