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

Levitin, Daniel J.

 
9781101985588: A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101985585 ISBN 13: 9781101985588
Verlag: Dutton, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

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!

 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D., is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI, a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and the James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Music at McGill University, Montreal, where he also holds appointments in the Program in Behavioural Neuroscience, The School of Computer Science, and the Faculty of Education. An award-winning scientist and teacher, he now adds best-selling author to his list of accomplishments as This Is Your Brain on Music , The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind were #1 best-sellers. His work has been translated into 21 languages. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer working with artists such as Stevie Wonder and Blue Oyster Cult. He has published extensively in scientific journals as well as music magazines such as Grammy and Billboard. Recent musical performances include playing guitar and saxophone with Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, David Byrne, Cris Williamson, Victor Wooten, and Rodney Crowell.

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Plausibility

Statistics, because they are numbers, appear to us to be cold, hard facts. It seems that they represent facts given to us by nature and it's just a matter of finding them. But it's important to remember that people gather statistics. People choose what to count, how to go about counting, which of the resulting numbers they will share with us, and which words they will use to describe and interpret those numbers. Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations. And your interpretation may be just as good as, or better than, that of the person reporting them to you.

Sometimes, the numbers are simply wrong, and it's often easiest to start out by conducting some quick plausibility checks. After that, even if the numbers pass plausibility, three kinds of errors can lead you to believe things that aren't so: how the numbers were collected, how they were interpreted, and how they were presented graphically.

In your head or on the back of an envelope you can quickly determine whether a claim is plausible (most of the time). Don't just accept a claim at face value; work through it a bit.

When conducting plausibility checks, we don't care about the exact numbers. That might seem counterintuitive, but precision isn't important here. We can use common sense to reckon a lot of these: If Bert tells you that a crystal wineglass fell off a table and hit a thick carpet without breaking, that seems plausible. If Ernie says it fell off the top of a forty-story building and hit the pavement without breaking, that's not plausible. Your real-world knowledge, observations acquired over a lifetime, tells you so. Similarly, if someone says they are two hundred years old, or that they can consistently beat the roulette wheel in Vegas, or that they can run forty miles an hour, these are not plausible claims.

What would you do with this claim?

In the thirty-five years since marijuana laws stopped being enforced in California, the number of marijuana smokers has doubled every year.

Plausible? Where do we start? Let's assume there was only one marijuana smoker in California thirty-five years ago, a very conservative estimate (there were half a million marijuana arrests nationwide in 1982). Doubling that number every year for thirty-five years would yield more than 17 billion-larger than the population of the entire world. (Try it yourself and you'll see that doubling every year for twenty-one years gets you to over a million: 1; 2; 4; 8; 16; 32; 64; 128; 256; 512; 1024; 2048; 4096; 8192; 16,384; 32,768; 65,536; 131,072; 262,144; 524,288; 1,048,576.) This claim isn't just implausible, then, it's impossible. Unfortunately, many people have trouble thinking clearly about numbers because they're intimidated by them. But as you see, nothing here requires more than elementary school arithmetic and some reasonable assumptions.

Here's another. You've just taken on a position as a telemarketer, where agents telephone unsuspecting (and no doubt irritated) prospects. Your boss, trying to motivate you, claims:

Our best salesperson made 1,000 sales a day.

Is this plausible? Try dialing a phone number yourself-the fastest you can probably do it is five seconds. Allow another five seconds for the phone to ring. Now let's assume that every call ends in a sale-clearly this isn't realistic, but let's give every advantage to this claim to see if it works out. Figure a minimum of ten seconds to make a pitch and have it accepted, then forty seconds to get the buyer's credit card number and address. That's one call per minute (5 + 5

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101985585
ISBN 13 
9781101985588
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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