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A Field Guide To Lies: Critical Thinking in The Information Age

This document is an introduction to Daniel Levitin's book "A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age". The book aims to help readers identify problems with facts they encounter that could lead them to draw incorrect conclusions. It covers ways people can be misled by statistics, graphs, arguments and other information. The introduction outlines how the book is divided into three parts on evaluating numbers, words and our understanding of the world. It emphasizes the importance of critical thinking to separate claims with evidence from those without in order to avoid being misinformed.

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407 views3 pages

A Field Guide To Lies: Critical Thinking in The Information Age

This document is an introduction to Daniel Levitin's book "A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age". The book aims to help readers identify problems with facts they encounter that could lead them to draw incorrect conclusions. It covers ways people can be misled by statistics, graphs, arguments and other information. The introduction outlines how the book is divided into three parts on evaluating numbers, words and our understanding of the world. It emphasizes the importance of critical thinking to separate claims with evidence from those without in order to avoid being misinformed.

Uploaded by

RyujiNaoto
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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A Field Guide to Lies:

Critical Thinking in the Information Age


hhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Levitin

Introduction: Thinking, Critically --------------------------------------------------------------- ix

PART ONE: EVALUATING NUMBERS


Plausibility ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3
Fun with Average --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11
Axis Shenanigans---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26
Hijinks with How Numbers Are Reported --------------------------------------------------- 43
How Numbers are Collected -------------------------------------------------------------------- 75
Probabilities --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 97

PART TWO: EVALUATING WORDS


How Do We Know? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------123
Identifying Expertise ----------------------------------------------------------------------------129
Overlooked, Undervalued Alternative Explanations--------------------------------------152
Counterknowledge ------------------------------------------------------------------------------168

PART THREE: EVALUATING OUR WORLD


How Science Works -----------------------------------------------------------------------------181
Logical Fallacies ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------198
Knowing What You Don't Know --------------------------------------------------------------211
Bayesian Thinking in Science and in Court -------------------------------------------------216
Four Case Studies --------------------------------------------------------------------------------222

Conclusion: Discovering Your Own ----------------------------------------------------------251

Dr. Levitin is the author of several books including


• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, (2006), New York:
Dutton/Penguin. (Released in the U.K. and Commonwealth territories by Atlantic, 2007).
(Appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List both in hardcover and paperback)
• The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), New York:
Dutton/Penguin and Toronto: Viking/Penguin. (New York Times Bestseller)
• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload (2014), New York:
Dutton/Penguin Random House and Toronto: Allen Lane/Penguin Random House and London:
Viking/Penguin Random House.
INTRODUCTION: THINKING CRITICALLY
This is a book about how to spot problems with the facts you encounter, problems that
may lead you to draw the wrong conclusions. Sometimes the people giving you the facts are
hoping you'll draw the wrong conclusion; sometimes they don't know the difference
themselves. Today, information is available nearly instantaneously, but it is becoming
increasingly hard to tell what's true and what's not, to sift through the various claims we hear
and to recognize when they contain misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies.
There are many ways we can be led astray by fast-talking, loose-writing purveyors of
information. Here, I've grouped them into two categories and they make the first two parts of
this book: numerical and verbal. The first includes mishandled statistics and graphs; the second
includes faulty arguments. In both parts, I include the steps we can take to better evaluate
news, statements and reports. The last part of the book addresses what underlies our ability to
determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. It grapples with the limits of
what we can and cannot know, including what we know right now and don't know just yet, and
includes some applications of logical thinking.
It is easy to lie with statistics and graphs because few people take the time to look under
the hood and see how they work. I aim to fix that. Recognizing faulty arguments can help you
evaluate whether a chain of reasoning leads to a valid conclusion or not. Related to this is
infoliteracy – recognizing that there are hierarchies in source quality, that pseudo-facts can
easily masquerade as facts, and biases can distort the information we are being asked to
consider, leading us to faulty conclusions.
You might object and say, "But it's not my job to evaluate statistics critically.
Newspapers, bloggers, the government, Wikipedia, etc., should be doing that for us." Yes they
should, but they don't always. We – each of us – need to think critically and carefully about the
numbers and words we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making
the most of our lives. This means checking the numbers, the reasoning and the sources for
plausibility and rigor. It means examining them as best we can before we repeat them or use
them to form an opinion. We want to avoid the extremes of gullibly accepting every claim we
encounter or cynically rejecting every one. Critical thinking doesn't mean we disparage
everything, it means we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.
Sometimes the evidence consists of numbers and we have to ask, "Where did those
numbers come from? How were they collected?" Sometimes the numbers are ridiculous, but it
takes some reflection to see it. Sometimes claims seem reasonable, but come from a source
that lacks credibility, like a person who reports having witnessed and accident but wasn't
actually there. This book can help you to avoid learning a whole lot of things that aren't so.
And catch some lying weasels in their traces.

2016-Levitin-Field-Guide-To-Lies-TOC-Intro.pdf Page 2
We've created more human-made information in the last five years than in all of human
history before that. Unfortunately, found alongside things that are true is an enormous
number of things that are not, in websites, videos, books and on social media. This is not just a
new problem. Misinformation has been a fixture of human life for thousands of years, and was
documented in biblical times and in classical Greece. The unique problem we face today is that
misinformation has proliferated; it is devilishly entwined on the Internet with real information,
making the two difficult to separate. And misinformation is promiscuous – it consorts with
people of all social and educational classes and turns up in places you don't expect it to. It
propagates as one person passes it on to another and another, as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat,
and other social media grab hold of it and spread it around the world; the misinformation can
take hold and become well known and suddenly a whole lot of people are believing things that
aren't so.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS <Excerpt>
The inspiration for this book came from Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics, a book I've read several
times and appreciate more with each reading. I was also a huge fan of Joel Best's Damned Lies and
Statistics, and Charles Wheelan's Naked Statistics. I owe all three authors a great debt for their humor,
wisdom and insight, and I hope this book will take its place alongside theirs for anyone who wants to
improve their understanding of critical thinking.

INDEX <Excerpts>
Causation, 48-51
Coincidence, 49-50
Comparisons, 61-73
Conditional probabilities, 102-3, 218
visualizing with four-fold tables, 108-111, 118-19
confidence intervals, 82-84
contrapositive statements, 187, 189
Confounding factors, 212
Fallacies, 198-210
cum hoc, ergo propter hoc, 49
post hoc. ergo propter hoc. 48-49. 207-8, 210
inductive reasoning, 183-84, 190-91, 192
representative sampling, 76-80, 161-64.
statistical literacy, 166-67
science and the scientific method, 181-197
and abductive reasoning, 191-92
and alternative explanations, 249
and experimental design, 213
and inductive reasoning, 183-84, 190-91, 192
third factor x explanation of correlations, 50-51

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Lies-Critical-Information/dp/0525955224/ref=sr_1_1

2016-Levitin-Field-Guide-To-Lies-TOC-Intro.pdf Page 3

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