Behind the Label
Why we do this.
Our mission
Fear spreads faster than facts. A lot of misinformation is loud, funded, and engineered to make you afraid and angry, because fear and anger are what get shared. We don't think the answer is shouting louder.
The answer is teaching people, before the next scary claim hits, how to check it for themselves. That's prebunking: building the mental antibodies early, so a manipulative headline lands as a question instead of a panic. Our goal is to bring the temperature down, hand people the tools to tell fact from fear, and take the politics out of questions that were never meant to be political, like whether a treatment works or how to read a study.
Evidence doesn't belong to a party. Neither should your health.
The shelf
No hidden ingredients. That goes for our thinking too. Our evidence-literacy work, the Skeptic's Toolkit, Got Skepticism?, and the OPEN, PAUSE, STARVE, and REACH cards, stands on the shoulders of people who spent their lives teaching the rest of us how to think clearly and talk to each other. Here's the shelf. Every ingredient, listed.
A few links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, it helps fund this work at no extra cost to you. See the disclosure at the bottom.
The science of seeing clearly
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Carl Sagan
The source of the Baloney Detection Kit, and the heart of Got Skepticism? Sagan's case for wonder and rigor in the same breath is the closest thing we have to a founding text.
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The Scout Mindset
Julia Galef
The difference between a soldier who defends a position and a scout who wants to see what's really there. This is the calibrated middle our whole game is built around.
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Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West
How numbers, charts, and studies get used to mislead, and how to catch it. Straight into the "weigh the evidence" and "spot the trick" moves.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Why our quick, confident gut so often gets it wrong. The reason a game about calibration, matching confidence to evidence, needs to exist at all.
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Factfulness
Hans Rosling
A hopeful, data-grounded case that the world is more understandable, and less scary, than the headlines suggest. Skepticism in service of seeing things as they are.
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Staying in the room
How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay
Techniques for talking with people you disagree with, without either of you storming off. Direct DNA of the OPEN and PAUSE cards in Stay in the Room.
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Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switzler
How to keep dialogue safe and honest when emotions run hot. The playbook behind keeping the temperature down and the trust up.
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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Meeting people at the need underneath the words. The empathy engine behind talking to a Believer without shame, or a Denier without a fight.
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson
Why we double down instead of admitting we were wrong, and how to notice ourselves doing it. The Denier and the Believer both live in these pages. So do we.
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Try the tools
Play Got Skepticism? →
Read Root to Rx →
Affiliate disclosure. Open Label Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no additional cost to you. We only list books we genuinely stand behind.
