A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and

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

Winner of the National Business Book Award

FromÂ theÂ New York TimesÂ bestselling author ofÂ The Organized MindÂ andÂ This Is Your Brain on Music, aÂ primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than everÂ

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can processâ€”especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies.Â New York TimesÂ bestselling author Daniel J. LevitinÂ 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 categoriesâ€”statistical information and faulty argumentsâ€”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 reasoningâ€”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!Â

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Country USA
Manufacturer Dutton
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2019-11-19
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Dutton
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2019-11-19
Format	Kindle eBook

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

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