Encyclopedia of Sophistry
by Immanuel Tolstoyevski
The author is a “scarfless intellectual” who left his career as an Electrical Engineer and started working in various voluntary projects and gave seminars. He also has a podcast series called “scarfless intellectual”, which I follow fondly. In this book, we can see examples of today’s fallacies, critical thinking and cognitive psychology.
If we can understand the fallacies that come our way (and identify it as a fallacy), it is possible for us to live our lives with less manipulation. It is possible to live in a more peaceful and happy environment by making more rational decisions. However, it is not easy to identify the fallacies and not to give credit to them, especially considering that the education we have is completely free from questioning, and its purpose is to both gain certain competencies and raise societies that do not question… So let’s learn how to use machines, but what exactly are these machines for? What is its place in the big picture, why don’t we worry about questions such as why technological innovations do not happen in our country.
Here is a quote from the book that I really like:
“Today’s people know that they don’t belong here, but they can’t help it; rejoices with the stories of the leaders, sleeps with the lullabies of the teachers, and is clamped by the threat of “others”. Most of all he is afraid. He fears the existence of other truths and the absence of infallible gods. He wants to understand an increasingly complex world with increasingly shorter sentences. He seeks the bliss of ignorance in the middle of the Information Age.”
In the pre-internet era, people did not need to reason, express their opinions, and connect as much as they do today. Our increasing intensity of communication with the Internet has fueled our fallacies and prejudices.
It is interested that while the confident and fervent defense of the ideas of someone we agree with brings us closer to that idea, the self-confidence of someone we disagree with does not affect us. Moreover, as we are exposed to more information, we do not become more open-minded, our existing beliefs become stronger. We always want to see events that support existing beliefs. For example, in ancient times, substances such as mercury, lead, and arsenic were thought to prolong life in China. No one questioned this for many years despite the unsuccessful results. Our brain tends to focus on the prominent possibility and ignore other possibilities. Our biases allow us to focus on a single path in practice. When we look at the result, we see the proof.
We are not beings who want to reach the truth at all costs, so nonsense has always existed and will continue to exist.
