Preface: Detecting Deception and Why It Matters

Section 1: Distractions and Deceptions
1. The Personal Attack: "We Shouldn't Listen to Dummies"
2. Poisoning the Well: "Nothing to See Here"
3. The Straw Man: "Said No One Ever"
4. The Appeal to Hypocrisy: "She Did It First!"
5. The Red Herring: "Look! Squirrel!"
6. The Black and White: "There Are Only Two Things That Could Happen"
7. The Slippery Slope: "And You'll End up Living in a Van by the River"
8. The Fallacy of Fallacies: "One Rotten Apple Spoils the Grocery Store"
9. The Faulty Analogy: "Comparing Oranges to Falsehoods"
10. The Irrelevant Conclusion: "Cool. Don't Care"
11. The Hasty Generalization: "I Saw a Thing Once"
12. The Division Fallacy: "All the Children Are Above Average"
13. The Composition Fallacy: "Great Players Must Make a Great Band"
14. Begging the Question: "The Blue Sky Is Blue"
15. The Appeal to Purity: "Real Men Don't Eat Haggis"
16. Equivocation: "I Mean, I Am Nice"
17. The Sunk Cost: "We've Already Invested so Much"
Section 2: Unrelated Evidence
18. The Appeal to Pity: "If You Really Cared About Me"
19. The Appeal to Force: "Agree-or Else"
20. The Appeal to Ignorance: "No One Has Proved You Can't"
21. The Appeal to Authority: "I'm Not a Doctor But . . ."
22. The Appeal to Tradition: "We've Always Done It This Way"
23. The Appeal to Popularity: "A Lot of People Agree"
24. The Big Lie and Conspiracy Theories: "The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green. The Sky Is Green"

Section 3: Issues with Numbers and Data
25 Ignoring the Base Rate: "100 Percent of People Die"
26 The False Cause: "Spider Bites and Spelling Bees"
27 The Hidden Variable: "Rabbit Feet and Lucky Rocks"
28 Unnecessary Precision: "The Difference That Doesn't Matter"
29 Naive Probability and the Audience It Confuses: "This Slot Machine Is Hot"
30 Deception with Charts: "A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Lies"
31 Misrepresenting Polls and Surveys: "Four out of Five Dentists Surveyed Agree"

Appendix 1: Possible Answers to Section 1 Exercises
Appendix 2: Possible Answers to Section 2 Exercises
Appendix 3: Possible Answers to Section 3 Exercises