A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel J Levitin

A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel J Levitin

Winner of the National Business Book Award

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, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories--statistical information 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 weasels in their tracks! 


 

Daniel Levitin on CTV's The Hour talks about his trade book The World in Six Songs: http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGam4e0X2cw&NR=1

Daniel J. Levitin is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Computer Science, Music, and Education. An award-winning teacher, he has also taught at Dartmouth College, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of Oregon. He is the author of the international best-sellers This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780593182512
ISBN 10	0593182510
Title	A Field Guide to Lies
Author	Daniel J Levitin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2019-11-19
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.