A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics

A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics

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  • Author: Daniel Levitin
  • Publisher: Penguin UK
  • ISBN: 0241974860
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304

A guide to critical thinking in the 'post-truth' era, from the author of Sunday Times best-seller The Organized Mind We live in a world of information overload. Facts and figures on absolutely everything are at our fingertips, but are too often biased, distorted, or outright lies. From unemployment figures to voting polls, IQ tests to divorce rates, we're bombarded by seemingly plausible statistics on how people live and what they think. Daniel Levitin teaches us how to effectively ask ourselves: can we really know that? And how do they know that? In this eye-opening, accessible guide filled with fascinating examples and practical takeaways, acclaimed neuroscientist Daniel Levitin shows us how learning to understand statistics will enable you to make better, smarter judgements on the world around you.


A Field Guide to Lies

A Field Guide to Lies

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  • Author: Daniel J. Levitin
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 0593182529
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 336

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!


Damned Lies and Statistics

Damned Lies and Statistics

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  • Author: Joel Best
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 0520274709
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 217

"[An] absolutely fascinating and sobering quest into the fantastic differences between the world as it is and the world as it is portrayed in the statistics the media use. . . .This book is simply a must."—Nachman Ben-Yehuda, author of The Masada Myth "Best is our leading authority on social problems today. His detective work in exposing the spurious use of statistics is essential to constructive social science. No one who speaks for the public welfare can ignore his powerful work."—Jonathan B. Imber, Editor-in-Chief, Society "Joel Best is at it again. In Damned Lies and Statistics, he shows how statistics are manipulated, mismanaged, misrepresented, and massaged by officials and other powerful groups to promote their agendas. He is a master at examining taken-for-granted "facts" and debunking them through careful sociological scrutiny."—Patricia Adler, author of Peer Power "A real page turner. Best is the John Grisham of sociology!"—James Holstein, author of The New Language of Qualitative Method "In our era, numbers are as much a staple of political debates as stories. And just as stories so often turn into fables, so Best shows that we often believe the most implausible of numbers--to the detriment of us all."—Peter Reuter, co-author of Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices,Times and Places


Weaponized Lies Deluxe

Weaponized Lies Deluxe

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  • Author: Daniel J. Levitin
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 1524742279
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 213

This deluxe eBook (previously published as A Field Guide to Lies Deluxe) features six videos from Daniel Levitin, with more examples, anecdotes, and added visual guides. We’re surrounded by fringe theories, fake news, and pseudo-facts. These lies are getting repeated. New York Times bestselling author Daniel Levitin shows how to disarm these socially devastating inventions and get the American mind back on track. Here are the fundamental lessons in critical thinking that we need to know and share now. Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments on the other hand can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps we can take to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Ultimately, Levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, medical decision making, magic, modern physics, and conspiracy theories. This urgently needed book enables us to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. As Levitin attests: Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Euphemisms like "fringe theories," "extreme views," "alt truth," and even "fake news" can literally be dangerous. Let's call lies what they are and catch those making them in the act.


A Field Guide to Lies Deluxe

A Field Guide to Lies Deluxe

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  • Author: Daniel J. Levitin
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 1101986182
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 201

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. This deluxe eBook features six videos from Daniel Levitin, with more examples, anecdotes, and added visual guides. 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!


A Field Guide to Lies

A Field Guide to Lies

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  • Author: Daniel J. Levitin
  • Publisher: Viking
  • ISBN: 9780241239995
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304

"We live in a world of informationoverload. Facts and figures on absolutely everything are at our fingertips, but are too often biased, distorted, or outright lies. From unemployment figures to voting polls, IQ tests to divorce rates, we're bombarded by seemingly plausible statistics on how people live and what they think. Daniel Levitin teaches us how to effectively ask ourselves- can we reallyknow that? And how do theyknow that? In this eye-opening, accessible guide filled with fascinating examples and practical takeaways, acclaimed neuroscientist Daniel Levitin shows us how learning to understand statistics will enable you to make better, smarter judgements on the world around you."


Stat-Spotting

Stat-Spotting

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  • Author: Joel Best
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 0520279980
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 160

This edition updates benchmarks, includes a new chapter on rhetoric, updated a few examples, and thoroughly updated the bibliography.


Weaponized Lies

Weaponized Lies

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  • Author: Daniel Levitin
  • Publisher: Penguin UK
  • ISBN: 0241313570
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

A guide to critical thinking in the 'post-truth' era, from the author of Sunday Times best-seller The Organized Mind We live in a world where the line between truth and lies is increasingly blurred by euphemistic terms such as 'post-truth', 'counter-knowledge', 'fringe theories' and others. In a world where anyone can become an expert at the click of a button, we're worse equipped than ever to evaluate the information we encounter and separate the truth from the lies. Daniel Levitin debunks the idea that truth no longer exists, and shows that we urgently need to learn the skills toeffectively ask ourselves: can we really know that? And how do they know that? In this eye-opening, accessible guide filled with fascinating examples and practical takeaways, acclaimed neuroscientist Daniel Levitin shows us how learning to understand statistics will enable you to make better, smarter judgements on the world around you.


A Field Guide to Lies

A Field Guide to Lies

PDF A Field Guide to Lies Download

  • Author: Daniel J. Levitin
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9781101985588
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304


Conflicting Truths in Academic and Journalistic Writing

Conflicting Truths in Academic and Journalistic Writing

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  • Author: Josef Schmied
  • Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag
  • ISBN: 373696207X
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 296

The present volume draws on the experience of the Summer School held in August 2019 in Ohrid, where graduate students and experienced scholars met from Germany, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia, and Croatia. All contributions discuss original empirical research on texts that construe conflicting truths in the idest sense, either from academic or from journalistic writing, mainly from a South Eastern European perspective. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse in joint teaching, research and publishing.