A Field Guide to Lies
Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2017 National Business Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2016/2017 Donner Prize
From the bestselling author of The Organized Mind, the must-have book about how to analyze who and what to trust in the age of information overload.
It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions and outright lies from reliable information? In A Field Guide to Lies, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin outlines the many pitfalls of the information age and provides the means to spot and avoid them.
Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. It is easy to lie with stats and graphs as few people "take the time to look under the hood and see how they work." And, just because there's a number on something, doesn't mean that the number was arrived at properly. Logic can help to evaluate whether or not a chain of reasoning is valid. And "infoliteracy" teaches us that not all sources of information are equal, and that biases can distort data.
Faced with a world too eager to flood us with information, the best response is to be prepared. A Field Guide to Lies helps us avoid learning a lot of things that aren't true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levitin (The Organized Mind) equips readers with tools to combat misinformation bad data, false facts, distortions, and their ilk in this useful primer on the importance of critical thinking in daily life. Levitin divides information (and misinformation) into two categories: numerical and verbal. He begins with an examination of both deliberate and uninformed misuses of statistics and how to spot them. The concepts explored in this section are perennial favorites of critical-thinking instruction, including plausibility, "Axis Shenanigans," and the different types of probabilities. The second section, on evaluation words, explores less trodden grounds; particularly the discussion about expertise, which explores the concept in the context of individuals and institutions, and the ways that this expertise can be misapplied or misinterpreted. In his final third of the book is dedicated to the scientific method and how it actually works, as opposed to pseudoscientific imitations. In all three sections Levitin explores material that has often been written about elsewhere, but the book still serves its purpose as a valuable primer on critical thinking that convincingly illustrates the prevalence of misinformation in everyday life.
