This essay is a developed version of the Zeeman Lecture given at the Regulatory Policy Institute’s Annual Conference on 26 September 2017 at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. The motivation for the Lecture was that, in the period since the Brexit Referendum on 23 June 2016, politicians, interest groups, journalists and commentators have fed the public a steady diet of alternative facts and false or misleading propositions. The Lecture focused on three of a much wider set of such assertions and propositions. All are relevant to the future conduct of regulatory policy, though each in different ways. Each is associated with a cognitive style that I have called convenient, selective myopia.

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