Weaponized Lies

Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524742228
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
Previously Published as A Field Guide to Lies 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

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

Book Description
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!

Weaponized Lies Deluxe

Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524742279
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
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.

Teaching What Really Happened

Author: James W. Loewen
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807759481
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
“Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country.”— Howard Zinn James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled "Truth" that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery. Book Features: An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education. Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography. Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened. Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in today’s schools.

Weaponized Words

Author: Kurt Braddock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Discover theories of persuasion that show how terrorist messages promote radicalization and how counter-messages fight terrorist propaganda.

Post-Truth

Author: Lee McIntyre
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262345986
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
How we arrived in a post-truth era, when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Are we living in a post-truth world, where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of “fake news,” from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into “information silos.” What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts. McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

Likewar

Author: Peter Warren Singer
Publisher: Eamon Dolan Books
ISBN: 1328695743
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
Social media has been weaponized, as state hackers and rogue terrorists have seized upon Twitter and Facebook to create chaos and destruction. This urgent report is required reading, from defense experts P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.

Lies My Gov't Told Me

Author: Robert W. Malone
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510773258
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 602

Book Description
A WALL STREET JOURNALNATIONAL BESTSELLER *AS SEEN ON TUCKER CARLSON TODAY AND THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE* A guide for the times—breaking down the lies about COVID-19 and shedding light on why we came to believe them. When he invented the original mRNA vaccine technology as a medical and graduate student in the late 1980s, Robert Malone could not have imagined that he would become a leader in a movement to expose the dangers of mRNA vaccines that billions of people have received—too often without being informed of the risks. For voicing opposition to the “mainstream” narrative, Dr. Robert Malone was censored by Big Tech and vilified by the media. But he continues to speak out and alert the world to the web of lies that we have all experienced. From vaccine safety and effectiveness to early treatments like ivermectin, to lockdowns, masks, and more, Dr. Malone is the signature dissident voice telling the other side of the story about COVID, the role of corporate media, censorship, propaganda, and the brave new world of transhumanism promoted by the World Economic Forum and its acolytes. What effect did the COVID policies have on lives, livelihoods, and democracies? How is it possible that the lies spread by governments would persist, and that our institutions would fail to correct them? Lies My Gov’t Told Me takes a hard look at these questions and illustrates how data, information, and psychology have been distorted during the pandemic. Governments intentionally weaponized fear to mold behavior. The media smeared anyone who objected to the narrative. And Big Pharma—aligned with larger globalist interests exemplified by the likes of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum—had captured the agencies that are supposed to regulate it long before the pandemic began. Dr. Malone explores these perverse connections between Pharma, government, and media, and tells us what can be done about it. With contributed chapters from other leading thinkers, such as Dr. Paul Marik and Professor Mattias Desmet, and drawing upon history, psychology, and economics, Lies My Gov’t Told Me looks at COVID from numerous angles. Never satisfied with a simple answer or easy solution, Dr. Malone proposes multiple action plans for a better future. Dr. Malone calls on each of us to find our own solutions, our own ways to resist the control of fascist, corporatist, and totalitarian overlords. If we are to step out of the darkness—toward a world that defends the principles of the Constitution, upholds individual rights, and honors free speech—we all must play a part in the transition.

Fake News Nation

Author: James W. Cortada
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538131110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
How rumors, lies, and misrepresentations shaped American history After the election of Donald Trump as president, people in the United States and across large swaths of Europe, Latin America, and Asia engaged in the most intensive discussion in modern times about falsehoods pronounced by public officials. Fake facts in their various forms have long been present in American life, particularly in its politics, public discourse, and business activities – going back to the time when the country was formed. This book explores the long tradition of fake facts, in their various guises, in American history. It is one of the first historical studies to place the long history of lies and misrepresentation squarely in the middle of American political, business, and science policy rhetoric. In Fake News Nation, James Cortada and William Aspray present a series of case studies that describe how lies and fake facts were used over the past two centuries in important instances in American history. Cortada and Aspray give readers a perspective on fake facts as they appear today and as they are likely to appear in the future.

The World in Six Songs

Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101043458
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
The author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music’s role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that “will leave you awestruck” (The New York Times). Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types—friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love—then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these “six songs” work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species. Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved—right up to the iPod.