From one of the world's leading experts in business storytelling, and for readers of Daniel Levitin, Nate Silver, and Charles Duhigg, Truth: A User's Guide is about the different types of competing truths we face every day in life: how to identify them, why they work, when they are used and misused, and what we can do to guard against them or--when appropriate--to make constructive use of them.
We tend to see the world like Orwell's Winston Smith: "There was truth and there was untruth." Yet the world is far more complicated than that. In a time of "post-truth", when "fake news" is itself the subject of our headlines, it is not "untruths" that we need to worry about. Hector Macdonald reveals and examines one of our greatest collective blind spots: we are all routinely misled by the truth. This is because for any fact, scenario, story, and situation, there are what Hector terms "Competing Truths." Why do Competing Truths matter? They matter because we vote, shop, work, co-operate, and fight based on what we believe to be true, and what we believe depends in large part on what we read or hear from others. Many of the most sophisticated and influential forms of political, business, and media communication manipulate technically true statements to pull the wool over the public's eyes. Truth is not an absolute--it has its own spectrum. Truth: A User's Guide shows us how to cut through the nebulous issue of truth using a scaffold of timely examples. These examples range from the disingenuous use of statistics in Donald Trump's speeches to the 2013 fallacy that Western quinoa demand was disadvantaging native Andean farmers, to the structure, ethics, and success of Uber. Macdonald is as comfortable and insightful parsing the influence of Facebook as he is examining Colgate's misleading campaign as the toothpaste recommended by dentists.
Truth: A User's Guide explores how we can guard against the noise of competing truths, in business, in our personal relationships, and within ourselves, but also how we can use them to our advantage. Written with authority and humour, this is an accessible and illuminating narrative that will find a wide audience among readers in search of understanding why the meaning of "truth" seems to have gone completely haywire. While Hector Macdonald's debut novel is garnering him comparisons to such writers as Michael Crichton and Alex Garland, critics have also dubbed him a true original. The Mind Game is a riveting blend of science fiction and psychological suspense that places Macdonald prominently on the literary map. The Andean dilemma
For vegetarians and coeliacs, the discovery of quinoa was a kind of miracle. Here was a gluten-free seed, rich in magnesium and iron, that contained more protein than any grain, including all the essential amino acids our bodies cannot produce for themselves. NASA declared quinoa to be one of the most perfectly balanced nutrients on Earth and considered it ideal for astronauts. 'Quinoa tastes great, has a satisfying, "bouncy" texture and is one of the healthiest foodstuffs going,' raved Yotam Ottolenghi in 2007. Grown in the Andes, quinoa had a story that charmed Western consumers: the Incas prized the seed so highly they deemed it sacred and named it 'the mother of all grains'; their emperor would sow the first seeds of the season with tools made of gold.
The so-called 'superfood' was even celebrated by the United Nations, which declared 2013 the 'International Year of Quinoa'. But quinoa fans were in for a disturbing revelation. Between 2006 and 2013, quinoa prices in Bolivia and Peru tripled. At first, the price rise was celebrated for raising the living standards of poor Andean farmers. Then came rumours that local people could no longer afford to eat their traditional food because of the insatiable demand from North America and Europe. The Independent warned in 2011 that quinoa consumption in Bolivia had 'slumped by 34 per cent over fi
