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Bad Faith & Bad Arguments: A Skeptic's Field Guide to Fallacies, Manipulation, and Skeptical Thinking
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 29 2026
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
You are going to be lied to today. Probably more than once.
By someone selling an investment scheme, a political talking point, a miracle cure, a mattress, or a worldview. Some of them know they're lying. Most don't. And here's the uncomfortable part: the damage to your money, your decisions, and the people you care about is exactly the same either way.
The good news? Spotting most lies is a learnable skill that this book teaches.
BAD FAITH & BAD ARGUMENTS is a no-nonsense field guide to the reasoning errors, rhetorical tricks, and bad-faith tactics used to manipulate you. It won't tell you what to think. It gives you something more useful: a fast, reliable way to figure out when someone is wrong before it costs you. Bogus claims takes seconds to invent and can take hours to disprove. This book helps you quickly triage and reject most of them.INSIDE, YOU'LL LEARN TO RECOGNIZE:
- Unfalsifiable claims engineered so no evidence could ever disprove them
- Statistical illusions that fool even doctors, from over diagnosis to the Will Rogers phenomenon
- Cherry-picking & de-contextualization - how true facts get weaponized into lies
- Logical fallacies: non-sequiturs, false dichotomies, circular reasoning, category errors, and the always-irritating false equivalence
- No True Scotsman - the escape hatch used by fake self-help gurus and others
- And many more
THEN IT GOES DEEPER, INTO THE LANGUAGE OF MANIPULATION:
- Thought-terminating clichés that shut down thinking
- Motte-and-bailey: defending something modest while advancing something extreme
- Kafkatrapping, where your denial is treated as proof of guilt
- Manufactured consensus, astroturfing, and fake grassroots movements
- Emotional hijacking through fear, guilt, outrage, and manufactured urgency
- Gish gallops, whataboutism, and the fine art of the non-answer
You'll also get a memorable origin story of the scientific method-the only system humanity has ever built that's deliberately designed to catch itself being wrong-plus a quick-reference glossary and a cognitive-bias cheat sheet you'll come back to again and again.
WHO THIS IS FOR:
Investors, voters, parents, business owners, students, journalists and teachers - anyone who makes decisions based on what other people tell them or is responsible for sharing information with others.
A WARNING:
This book doesn't entertain false equivalencies, social niceties, or comfortable fantasies. It's blunt, occasionally funny, and built on a single stubborn premise: reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and no amount of belief changes the facts.
Reading it won't make you cynical. It'll make you harder to fool.
Open it. Start spotting the nonsense.
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