A Field Guide to Lies : Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method

Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of the 2017 National Business Book Award Shortlisted for the 2016/2017 Donner Prize PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AS WEAPONIZED LIES Updated with an exciting new package, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever. We are bombarded with more information each day than the mind can process--especially in election season. New York Times bestselling author Daniel Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports with engaging humor and authority.      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? Daniel 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. 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.