Last week you shared something you believed was true. A study. A statistic. A fact.
There’s a 64% chance it was false.
Researchers tried to replicate 100 published studies from top scientific journals. Only 36% held up. The rest? Garbage. But here’s the scary part: those fake studies are still being cited. Still shaping policy. Still being shared by people who think they’re informed.
We’re all doing it.
Here’s what’s really happening:
We see a pattern—coffee drinkers live longer—and our brains scream “FACT!” But that’s inductive reasoning: a probable guess based on limited data. Not certainty. Not truth. Just... likely. Maybe.
Meanwhile, someone who understands deductive reasoning sees the same study and thinks: “Interesting correlation. Not causation. Need more data.”
Same information. Completely different conclusions. One person gets manipulated. The other doesn’t.
The gap between these two thinking styles? That’s where they get us.
This isn’t about intelligence. Nobody taught us the difference between “probably true” and “definitely true.” And that gap? Politicians, algorithms, and corporations live there. They exploit it. They profit from it. They’re counting on us not knowing.
MIT proved it: fake news spreads ten times faster than truth. Not because it’s better—because it exploits flawed reasoning most of us never learned to spot.
In this week’s Thinking 101 Series, I break down exactly how to close that gap. How to label reasoning types instantly. How to spot manipulation in real-time. How to stop being used as a vector for misinformation.
✅👉 Watch: How to Improve Your Logical Reasoning Skills - https://youtu.be/fiznmk7NhZA
The tools exist. The question is whether we’ll use them.
Episode 2 of Thinking 101 Series of videos. Cross-posted from Phil McKinney’s Innovation Studio YouTube Channel. Subscribe at youtube.com/@PhilMcKinney