A Field Guide to Lies
Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Ratings6
Average rating3.5
15
Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Ratings6
Average rating3.5
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Definitely learned stuff from this book but its not an entertaining tome and is drier than Levitin's other works.
Given that I have a background in engineering, most of what this book describes is something I already saw during my course. But Levitin keeps it interesting with lots of examples.
You could argue reading this is timely in the lead up to the 2016 elections but it speaks to a nuance that is completely lacking in this particular campaign.
It's more about the skewing of stats, presenting information that favours your viewpoint, logical fallacies. And it ties it into Fox News polls, autism claims, 9/11 truthers, unknown unknowns and more.
And while the sly authorial voice does occasionally peek out it reads like a first year textbook. There's the missed potential to have more fun with this but it instead, seriously and perhaps appropriately given the nature of the book, resorts to cold hard logical truths and talks of bimodal distributions and Bayesian probability.
Still, 3 out of 4 dentists agree that this is better than 50% of the books out there.
