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

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Synopsis
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!
Copyright:
2016

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780698409798
Related ISBNs:
9780525955221
Publisher:
Penguin Publishing Group
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Daniel J. Levitin
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Business and Finance, Psychology, Mathematics and Statistics, Sociology
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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