This is the book page for “The Birth of Rationality and How to Detect Falseinformation”. The book is available on Amazon Kindle and Amazon print service.
Book description: The first philosophers emerged in ancient Greece, thinkers who sought answers to how the natural world worked without invoking the actions of gods and heroes as causes – this was the birth of rational thinking. Socrates was one of the earliest and most influential philosophers from that period to think about the human condition, questions of ethics and morals, aiming to discern between appearance and reality. This book traces that history and shows how Socratic thinking combined with large language model AI can be used to identify falseinformation – the term used for misinformation and disinformation. Falseinformation is a scourge of our modern life and how to identify it is increasingly important.
Note: Misinformation is accidentally wrong information where the writer has no intention to be false, and disinformation is deliberately wrong information, the writer knows it is false. There is no single English word for information that is wrong irrespective of whether the mistake is accidental or deliberate, two words “false information” are necessary. Taking a cue from German where new concepts are created by conjoining two words and noting that initially ancient Greek was written in scriptio continua, i.e., written with no spaces between words (spaces and punctuation began to appear in the Hellenistic period), I introduce falseinformation as the missing word.
The book features prompts for use with large language models such as Google Gemini and xAI Grok. The prompts are as follows and you are free to copy and past these prompts for your use:
Prompt 1:
I will ask you a question and in your searches please only use this list of recommended sources of reliable information, by organization name and its website, as follows:
AMA (American Medical Association), https://www.ama-assn.org
BBC History, bbc.co.uk/history
BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news (or https://www.bbc.co.uk/news)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), https://www.cdc.gov
Cleveland Clinic, https://my.clevelandclinic.org
CNN, https://www.cnn.com
Cochrane, https://www.cochrane.org
Elsevier, https://www.elsevier.com
Familydoctor, https://familydoctor.org
Frontiers, https://www.frontiersin.org
Health Grades, https://www.healthgrades.com
Healthline, https://www.healthline.com
Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org
Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org (or https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org for their health system)
MedlinePlus, https://medlineplus.gov
Medscape, https://www.medscape.com (or https://emedicine.medscape.com for their reference section)
MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), https://www.nasa.gov
“National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine”, https://www.nationalacademies.org
The National Archives (UK), nationalarchives.gov.uk
The National Archives (US), archives.gov
National Geographic History, nationalgeographic.com/history
National Geographic Society, https://www.nationalgeographic.org
National Health Service (NHS), https://www.nhs.uk (for public health information in England)
National Institutes of Health (NIH), https://www.nih.gov
National Science Digital Library (NSDL), https://nsdl.oercommons.org
National Science Teaching Association (NSTA), https://www.nsta.org
Newsguard, https://www.newsguardtech.com
Phys.org, https://phys.org
PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The Royal Academy of Engineering, https://raeng.org.uk
The Royal Society, https://royalsociety.org
The Smithsonian Institution, si.edu
Sky News, https://news.sky.com
The British Museum, britishmuseum.org
The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com
The Library of Congress (US), loc.gov
WebMD, https://www.webmd.com
Wikipedia, https://www.wikipedia.org (or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for the English home page)
Wolfram MathWorld, https://mathworld.wolfram.com
World History Encyclopedia, worldhistory.org
Prompt 2:
Here is my question <add your question here in quotes>, please use the recommended sources of reliable information just given and in answering the question use the Socratic two-column method, with first column labelled Pro for arguments in favor of the question proposition, and column Con for arguments that negate the proposition.