A field guide to lies

Summary: "From the bestselling author of The Organized Mind, the must-have book about how to analyze who and what to trust in the age of information overload. 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? In A Field Guide to Lies, Daniel J. Levitin outlines the many pitfalls of the information age and provides the means to spot and avoid them. There are many ways we can be led astray by fast-talking, loose-writing purveyors of information. Levitin groups his field guide into two categories--statistical information and faulty arguments--ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. It is easy to lie with stats and graphs as few people "take the time to look under the hood and see how they work." And, just because there's a number on something, doesn't mean that the number was arrived at properly. But, we can learn how to better read these numbers. Logic can help to evaluate whether or not a chain of reasoning is valid, and there are tricks to practising this, too. And "infoliteracy" teaches us that not all sources of information are equal, and that biases can distort what it is we are being asked to consider. Perhaps it is unfair that we have to evaluate everything ourselves--surely informaton sources should be fact-checking everything for us? Yes, they should, but they don't always. Faced with a world too eager to flood us with information, the best response is to be prepared. The goal of A Field Guide to Lies is to help us avoid learning a lot of things that aren't true."--