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A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method
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About A Field Guide To Lies: Critical Thinking With
Product Description Winner of the National Business Book AwardFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some weasels in their tracks! Review Winner, National Business Book Award Winner, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, QWF Finalist, The Donner Prize Winner, Axiom Business Book Silver Award "Levitin has written an important book for our times. Everyone should read it—democracy depends on it.”—Vicente Fox, 55th President of Mexico "Levitin is brilliant. Everyone should read A Field Guide to Lies."—Chris Matthews "Eloquent."— The Los Angeles Review of Books “Mr. Levitin is the perfect guide...If everyone could adopt the level of healthy statistical skepticism that Mr. Levitin would like, political debate would be in much better shape.”— The Economist "The timing could not be better … for Daniel J. Levitin’s new book… a survival manual for the post-factual era…in the struggle against error and ignorance, lies and mistakes, he is both engaging and rewarding."— Literary Review of Canada "Who knew that a book about statistics could be so riveting!"—Dallas Public Library "Confirmation bias is a growing problem in the digital information age. As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a giant pattern detector. If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true…The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."—John Cleese "Misinformation is a part of everyday life in our data-intense, internet-enhanced world. Levitin provides an entertaining and engaging guide to how we can use critical thinking to avoid being fooled. A Field Guide to Lies is a valuable survival guide to consuming information in the digital age."—Lori Holt, Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University "Our brain is wired to make snap judgments. And those judgments can be very, very wrong. A Field Guide to Lies…teaches how to separate fact from fringe theories and 'fake news.'"—NPR's Marketplace "In a post-truth world, Levitin's book is an invaluable primer on how to sort the fact from the fiction."— Sunday Times of London "A practical guide to better managing today’s constant flow of data and to improving critical thinking…A recommended book f
