Fallacies: B (Part 2 of 3)

Core idea

The middle of the B-entries is anchored by one extended case study — the Bermuda Triangle — surrounded by smaller corrections about bats, blood and birds. The Triangle entry is the most valuable demonstration in this stretch of the book, because it does not just declare the legend false; it shows the machinery that built it. Bestselling accounts inflated routine losses by omitting context, preferring sensational witnesses over sober ones, and inventing a dramatic final radio message that no logbook records.

The smaller entries reinforce the same point with single facts. Bats are not blind; they simply rely on echolocation. Blood is never blue; veins look blue because of how light scatters in skin, an effect reinforced by colour-coded school diagrams. Birds do not die "of cold" but of starvation in frozen weather. Each correction replaces a vivid story with a duller mechanism — and the dull mechanism is the true one.

Why it matters

The Bermuda Triangle is worth dwelling on because its construction techniques are general. Omission — leaving out the storm, the night, the trainee crew. Selection — quoting the unbalanced witness, ignoring the eyewitnesses who saw a plane simply explode. Invention — a quotation traced, word for word, to a magazine article whose author got it second-hand. Recognise these moves and you can take apart most "unexplained mystery" content for yourself, not just this one.

The blood entry adds a quieter warning: misinformation can be seeded by a teaching aid. Diagrams colour arteries red and veins blue for clarity, and children conclude that venous blood is blue. A simplification adopted for convenience hardens into a believed fact. Good intentions are no guarantee against spreading an error.

Key takeaways

Mental model

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Practical application

The transferable skill is auditing a mystery for what is missing. When a story presents an inexplicable event, the question is rarely "what paranormal force did this" but "what ordinary facts has the storyteller left out." Was it night, not day? A storm, not calm weather? Trainees, not veterans? A second-hand quote, not a primary record?

Example

A video claims a stretch of highway is "cursed" because of its high crash count. Audit it the way Kusche audited the Triangle. First, omission: is the raw number compared to traffic volume? A busy road has more crashes simply because more cars use it. Second, selection: does the video quote shaken survivors describing "a strange feeling," while skipping the traffic engineers who cite a blind bend and a poor merge? Third, invention: is there a memorable line — a victim's last words, a recurring apparition — that no police report contains? Strip those three layers away and the curse becomes what the Triangle became: an ordinary place, ordinarily dangerous, dressed up by what the telling left out.

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