num_pages: 292
description: Winner of the National Business Book AwardFrom 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 processespecially 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 categoriesstatistical information and faulty argumentsultimately 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 reasoningnot 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! 
language: English
title: A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
publisher: Dutton