A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
 |
|
| Author | Daniel J. Levitin |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Critical thinking, skepticism |
| Publisher | Dutton (US), Allen-Lane (Canada), Viking (U.K.) |
|
Publication date
|
September, 2016 |
| Media type | Hardcover |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | |
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age, written by Daniel J. Levitin was originally published in 2016 in hardcover by Dutton, and will be republished March 6, 2017 in paperback with a revised introduction under the new title Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-truth Era. It is a non-fiction book to help people learn critical thinking skills, recognize logical fallacies and biases, and better test the veracity of information received through mass media. The book was listed on Canadian best sellers lists in September 2016,. It won the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation and a Silver Medal from the Axiom Business Book Awards .
Daniel Levitin was, at the time of the publication of A Field Guide to Lies, dean of social sciences at the Minerva Schools at KGI, a faculty member at the Center for Executive Education at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University. His interest in writing the guide developed in response to the overwhelming amount of information people receive through mass media on a daily basis and a desire to help people develop techniques to distinguish factual information from that which may be distorted, out-of-date, unscientific or in error.
Levitin is also the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006),The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), and The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014).
Introduction: Thinking, Critically
Part One: Evaluating Numbers
Part Two: Evaluating Words
Part Three: Evaluating the World
Conclusion: Discovering Your Own
A Field Guide to Critical Thinking is a handbook for people who want to learn ways to examine the veracity of information that comes to them through a variety of media. Levitin notes that people "have a tendency to apply critical thinking only to things we disagree with." He demonstrates how people can be "fooled and misled by numbers and logic" and offers strategies to recognize cognitive biases, logical fallacies and evaluate the reliability of sites encountered on the Web.
...
Wikipedia