Book Update: Launch Date

If nothing changes, then the book will be available in all the usual places on Sunday, 22 November 2026. The Sunday before Thanksgiving.

If I’ve pressed all the right buttons. That is one mighty if.

And by “all the usual places”, I mean on-line, and first at Amazon (I’m assuming). If Everything You Believe Is Wrong (second edition) shows up in a genuine bookstore, then everything I believe about bookstores will have been proved wrong. A nice irony.

But really, a practical impossibility. Between the covers, there are no gay hockey players or billionaire werewolf rapists, and I call Equality between the sexes (and every other damned placed) a fallacy with devastating consequences. The ladies who stock and peruse shelves will not hunger for this book.

At any rate, once I have links, I’ll add them to posts.

The last chapter on the Violence Is Not The Answer Fallacy was made easy by cooperation of the French. Merci, mes amis!

Indeed, too easy. Every day new examples show themselves, and, as the election grows nearer, the examples become more plentiful. But I had to say Arrête! at some point or it would never be done.

As I mentioned last update, I’ll be starting a YouTube (and elsewhere) series/playlist/Class on the book. That and excerpts will appear here. Naturally, I think there could—and certainly should—be great interest in both the book and series. But then I’ve been known to fall into Optimism at regular intervals.

I admit to trying AI (Grok) to help design the cover. A waste of time; indeed, most of one working day was blown trying to get it to behave. Problem was, even though it could crank out covers, the end results were just pictures. The text could not be adjusted except as a picture. And trying to do that caused all manner of imperfections (smears, blurs, wrong positioning, etc.). This also so with the lines I wanted.

But it was a breeze in GIMP, all from scratch. I should have known better. I wanted a throwback style, something reminiscent of the last century’s serious trade paperback covers. Only when I was done did I realize that I must have been thinking of David Stove’s Rationality of Induction.

That was the book, which I had to read three or four times to fully grasp, that got me started on a proper understanding of uncertainty, probability, epistemology. I read it after I did my PhD. Indeed, I never had heard of the book during grad school. I only found it later because of a footnote in Jaynes. Which was another book not read in any probability course. Chapters passed around then in samizdat form, and most weren’t interested. Most still aren’t. Sad.

Now that is not an irrelevant story here, because you’ll see the fruits of this labor in the Appendix of Everything You Believe Is Wrong. There I show how fallacies arise: mostly by misunderstanding the difference between local and universal or necessary truths. This is a distinction I fervently wish more would understand. But they won’t, because I am compelled to bury this material in an Appendix. If I didn’t, and tried to start the book with what seems an arcane discussion, none would buy it.

Anyway, the second edition is now very pretty. The first had a font size far too large, besides its numerous other flaws. Even though I’ve deleted the boring bits, what I’ve added turned the lot into 388 glorious pages of bad arguments. Still, since I’m keen on many reading it, I’m keeping the price down.

There will now, after requests, also be a hardback edition. They don’t do dust jackets, only hard covers (again, like Stove’s book!). But I’m forced to charge more for this, because it doubles the printing cost.

Video

Addendum: I forgot in the video to mention the signed-copies scheme. I have a bunch of numbered stickers (a.k.a. book plates) that I signed, and when the book is out, if anybody wants one, they can email me their address and I’ll mail them one.

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