A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age : Scientific Habits of Mind

We live in the Information Age, with billions of bytes of data just two swipes away. Yet how much of this is mis- or even disinformation? A lot of it is, and your search engine can't tell the difference. As a result, an avalanche of misinformation threatens to overwhelm the discourse we so desperately need to address complex social problems such as climate change, the food and water crises, biodiversity collapse, and emerging threats to public health. This book provides an inoculation against the misinformation epidemic by cultivating scientific habits of mind. Anyone can do it―indeed, everyone must do it if our species is to survive on this crowded and finite planet.

This survival guide supplies an essential set of apps for the prefrontal cortex while making science both accessible and entertaining. It will dissolve your fear of numbers, demystify graphs, and elucidate the key concepts of probability, all while celebrating the precise use of language and logic. David Helfand, one of our nation's leading astronomers and science educators, has taught scientific habits of mind to generations in the classroom, where he continues to wage a provocative battle against sloppy thinking and the encroachment of misinformation.

David J. Helfand has served on the faculty of Columbia University in New York for thirty-nine years, for nearly half that time as Chair of the Department of Astronomy. He has also spent three years at the University of Cambridge, most recently as the Sackler Distinguished Visiting Astronomer. He is the author of nearly 200 scientific publications and has mentored 22 PhD students, but most of his pedagogical efforts have been aimed at teaching science to non-science majors, including a course of his own design that treats the atom as a tool for revealing the quantitative history of everything from human diet and works of art to the Earth's climate and the Universe; this course was released as a 24-lecture set by The Teaching Company. Eleven years ago, he finally succeeded in implementing a vision he began working on in 1982 that has all Columbia first-year students taking a science course as part of Columbia's famed Core Curriculum. He received the University's 2001 Presidential Teaching Award and the 2002 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.
In 2005, he became involved in the effort to create Canada's first independent, non-profit, secular university, Quest University Canada. He was a Visiting Tutor in the University's inaugural semester in the Fall of 2007 and served as President & Vice-Chancellor from the Fall of 2008 through 2015 leading this innovative experiment in higher education. From 2011-2014, Prof. Helfand served as President of the American Astronomical Society, the professional organization of astronomers, astrophysicists and planetary scientists in North America. He believes he is a better cook than astronomer and, ambiguously, most of his colleagues who have sampled his gastronomical undertakings agree.