I liked “The Ten Steps For Effective Disagreements.“ Especially step 4, which talks about using the principle of charity. This is a critical thinking idea that says you should assume the best possible interpretation of a person's argument. I like how this part of the chapter goes into detail about how the “looping technique“ (a repeating and editing technique for arguments) is a good way of practicing the principle of charity.
In chapter 5, “How to Debunk and Disagree,“ something I found to be really interesting was the idea of “cognitive immunity.“ Andy Norman thinks that we should think of the brain as having its own defense system, and he imagines an entire “mental immune system,“ that fights against false information that you want to keep out (“mind parasites“).
Something that caught my attention in this book was the chapter about social media and algorithms (“algorithmic bananas“). What really stuck out to me was when Dr. Yasmin said, “Social media algorithms can act like rabbit holes that lead you into a swamp of quicksand where misinformation is shoved at you... But that content, instead of getting buried, gets boosted and spotlighted by algorithms...“ (page 214)
I don't usually read nonfiction, but I found this book to be really interesting. I liked how it dealt with the subject of news and the way the media can twist it and mold it to specifically fit different purposes and agendas. I could really tell that Dr. Yasmin was trying to get to readers understand that there is way more to being media literate than knowing how the news is reported.
My overall impression of the book is that it is super applicable to a classroom environment and something that I will utilize in my future classrooms! I am not a nonfiction reader so this was definitely outside of my comfort zone. It helped open me up to reading more nonfiction books in the near future. P.S. I posted these least two posts last week but for some reason they never finished uploading? I think it was due to the spotty area I was in.
I found the “Ten Steps For Effective Disagreements” to be useful and something I want to utilize in m future classrooms. It does a really good job explaining how to open up the room to discussions of handling disagreements being had. This is not only applicable to classrooms but in daily life as well.
A critique that I do have is that this book is quite tedious. I think this could‘ve been shortened to an extent because I personally did not find it engaging enough for a young audience. It often felt repetitive almost? Overall though, it‘s a decent book that I think parts of it are really important for students to look into.
The most memorable chapter was the social media chapter and your brain. Learning about how your brains gets hits of dopamine through social media and how your brain becomes semi-dependent or fully addicted to it is scary, but really important for young minds to understand (and adults, of course). It‘s like a plague that has infected almost everyone, and this chapter lowkey made me want to delete my social media because of how addictive it is.
Finishing out my What the Fact? Posts because life happened for awhile… anyways:
I like how Yasmin lets the young audience know that we are all, as humans, innately biased. The anecdote she gives about the bike and cognitive bias is adequate for her audience, but I also feel like some parts of the book can go over a younger audience‘s head because of the density of information and definitions.
“A good place to start is by acknowledging that you, yes, you, are biased. Then, because implicit biases are hidden by definition, you can use an online test, such as Harvard University‘s Implicit Association Test, to figure out what you need to work on.“
