In their book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, a pair of professors of logic and philosophy of science from University of California, Irvine, Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall, use computer models to explain how judgments about things, such as the causes or best cures for certain illnesses, spread through scientific networks—and how that spread can cause false beliefs to dominate a community even if each of the participants is individually rational. The authors offer juicy takeaways: We need to legally punish people for spreading unlabeled "fake news" and should abandon democratic control of "issues that require expert knowledge."

For the full story, please visit http://reason.com/archives/2019/04/01/the-misinformation-age.