A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Read A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age Online
Authors: Daniel J. Levitin
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Daniel J. Levitin
Dutton (2016)
Rating: ★★★★☆
From
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, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation 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 lying weasels in their tracks!
**
Also By Daniel J. Levitin
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
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Copyright © 2016 by Daniel J. Levitin
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eBook ISBN: 9780698409798
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Levitin, Daniel J., author.
Title: A field guide to lies : critical thinking in the information age / Daniel J. Levitin.
Description: New York : Dutton, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007356 | ISBN 9780525955221 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101985588 (export)
Subjects: LCSH: Critical thinking. | Fallacies (Logic) | Reasoning.
Classification: LCC BC177 .L486 2016 | DDC 153.4/2—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007356
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
To Shari, whose inquisitive mind made me a better thinker
CONTENTS
Introduction: Thinking, Critically
Hijinks with How Numbers Are Reported
Overlooked, Undervalued Alternative Explanations
PART THREE: EVALUATING THE WORLD
Bayesian Thinking in Science and in Court
Conclusion: Discovering Your Own
Appendix: Application of Bayes’s Rule
INTRODUCTION
T
HINKING
, C
RITICALLY
This is a book about how to spot problems with the facts you encounter, problems that may lead you to draw the wrong conclusions. Sometimes the people giving you the facts are hoping you’ll draw the wrong conclusion; sometimes they don’t know the difference themselves. Today, information is available nearly instantaneously, but it is becoming increasingly hard to tell what’s true and what’s not, to sift through the various claims we hear and to recognize when they contain misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies.
There are many ways that we can be led astray by fast-talking, loose-writing purveyors of information. Here, I’ve grouped them into two categories, and they make the first two parts of this book: numerical and verbal. The first includes mishandled statistics and graphs; the second includes faulty arguments. In both parts, I include the steps we can take to better evaluate news, statements, and reports. The last part of the book addresses what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. It grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know, including what we know right now and don’t know just yet, and includes some applications of logical thinking.
It is easy to lie with statistics and graphs because few people take
the time to look under the hood and see how they work. I aim to fix that. Recognizing faulty arguments can help you to evaluate whether a chain of reasoning leads to a valid conclusion or not. Related to this is infoliteracy—recognizing that there are hierarchies in source quality, that pseudo-facts can easily masquerade as facts, and biases can distort the information we are being asked to consider, leading us to faulty conclusions.
You might object and say, “But it’s not my job to evaluate statistics critically. Newspapers, bloggers, the government, Wikipedia, etc., should be doing that for us.” Yes, they should, but they don’t always. We—each of us—need to think critically and carefully about the numbers and words we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the numbers, the reasoning, and the sources for plausibility and rigor. It means examining them as best as we can before we repeat them or use them to form an opinion. We want to avoid the extremes of gullibly accepting every claim we encounter or cynically rejecting every one. Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything, it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.
Sometimes the evidence consists of numbers and we have to ask, “Where did those numbers come from? How were they collected?” Sometimes the numbers are ridiculous, but it takes some reflection to see it. Sometimes claims seem reasonable, but come from a source that lacks credibility, like a person who reports having witnessed a crime but wasn’t actually there. This book can help you to
avoid learning a whole lot of things that aren’t so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks.
We’ve created more human-made information in the last five
years than in all of human history before them. Unfortunately, found alongside things that are true is an enormous number of things that are not, in websites, videos, books, and on social media. This is not just a new problem.
Misinformation has been a fixture of human life for thousands of years, and was documented in biblical times and classical Greece. The unique problem we face today is that misinformation has proliferated; it is devilishly entwined on the Internet with real information, making the two difficult to separate. And misinformation is promiscuous—it consorts with people of all social and educational classes, and turns up in places you don’t expect it to. It propagates as one person passes it on to another and another, as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media grab hold of it and spread it around the world; the misinformation can take hold and become well known, and suddenly a whole lot of people are believing things that aren’t so.