Sunday, August 20, 2017

Thoughts on Levitin's Weaponized Lies & A Field Guide to Lies - Good reads on how statistics can deceive

With great interest, I read Daniel Levitin's recent books "Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era" and "A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age." Both of these books give a good primer to deal with statistics, going over such things in detail such as Bayesian analysis in terms of a 2x2 table. Levitin also talks a bit about how people sort the truth by simply making false graphs with unlabeled axes or how there are more subtle aspects such as subtly changing the denominator (eg when talking about individuals versus families). Altogether I found these extremely useful reads. One thing that was a little troublesome to me was that they were fairly similar books. I think it does make sense for the author to repurpose his text into more current times where we talk about fake news and so forth but I still found the overlap between the two books disconcerting.


https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Lies-Critical-Information/dp/1524702528
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age Audio CD – Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
by Daniel J. Levitin

https://www.amazon.com/Weaponized-Lies-Think-Critically-Post-Truth/dp/1101983825
Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era Reprint Edition
by Daniel J. Levitin (Author)

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