Weaponized Lies - Softcover

Daniel J. Levitin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241312426 ISBN 13: 9780241312421

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 2017

Synopsis

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, 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!




From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Daniel J. Levitin has a PhD in Psychology, training at Stanford University Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the No. 1 bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), published in nineteen languages, and the bestsellers The World in Six Songs (Dutton, 2008) and The Organized Mind (Viking, 2014). Currently he is a James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience and Music at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Review

Dan Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The Organized Mind is smart, important, and as always, exquisitely written. -- Daniel Gilbert, author of 'Stumbling on Happiness' on 'The Organized Mind'

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241312426
• ISBN 13: 9780241312421
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320