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

Recent musical performances include playing guitar and saxophone with Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, David Byrne, Cris Williamson, Victor Wooten, and Rodney Crowell. Daniel J. . Levitin, Ph.D., is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI, a Distinguished Faculty Fel

Levitin shows how to critically evaluate claims that charlatans, the media, and politicians would have us believe.”—Stan Lazic, Team Leader in Quantitative Biology at AstraZeneca“A must read! Professor Levitin convinces the reader why  critical thinking has become even more crucial in the Information Age. It covers so many of the insights of science, logic, and statistics that the public needs to know, yet are sadly neglected in the education that most of us receive.”—Edward K. Cheng, Tarkington Chair of Teaching Excellence and professor of law at Vanderbi

We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks!  . It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. From TheNew 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. 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. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. 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. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successfu

All around excellent Abacus I have read numerous books on this subject. Many of them have too many errors, focus on trivial considerations or arcane mathematical technicalities, and few cover the important subject of applying critical thinking not only to numbers but words (logic. Tough Ideas made Easy and go down Smooth For anyone about to start University this is a must have primer. Levitin writes in such an easy going way that you can see him smiling as he provides examples to explain hard ideas in a simple, clear manner. If you find stats and research methods confu. "A great guide to critical thinking" according to P. Pounds. An outstanding overview of critical thinking. A (relatively) short read but it does get the brain cells cranked up. You can't just breeze through it; you have to think and that's what makes it great.