A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age - Hardcover

Levitin, Daniel J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670069949 ISBN 13: 9780670069941

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016

Synopsis

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670069949
• ISBN 13: 9780670069941
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1