A
Field Guide to Lies by Daniel Levitin is subtitled “Critical
Thinking in the Information Age” and I loved the author’s many, many references
to our inclination to believe inaccurate and distorted information. I am sure that I can use those examples with
students and I look forward to hearing Daniel Levitin speak
about transforming education. He will be at our Cornog Auditorium (Northfield Campus) on Thursday,
September 8th beginning at 7:00 pm. Contact FAN (Family Action Network) or The Book Stall for more information.
Levitin writes that,
“Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations.” In A Field
Guide to Lies he explains the scientific method and encourages
students to ask questions like: What is the source of this data or quote?
Are the experts credible? Has the graph been distorted? What alternative relationships
or explanations exist? These are
exactly the types of questions that we, as librarians and teachers, are constantly
modeling for students. Levitin raises these issues in an engaging and
entertaining way and is a popular author with students, several of whom read
his This is Your Brain on Music each
year as part of a non-fiction assignment.
Here are a few recent
articles that we could tie to the concepts in A Field Guide to Lies (on order
for the new library):
- “Recidivism Watch” from The Washington Post (8/29/16)
- “The Fix” (8/24/16) also from The Washington Post
- “13 Tips for Reading General Election Polls like a Pro” (9/2/16) on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight
- If you have more to add, please let us know.
Another new and
related book is called Head in the
Cloud by William Poundstone. This title, too, deals with information,
although the focus is more on the value (or not) of general knowledge when students
can just Google everything. Well-known
author Poundstone relies on a number of surveys (Levitin would ask: What were
those sample sizes? Was this a representative sample? How were the questions worded?) in order to illustrate the inability
of respondents to accurately identify country names on a map, for example. Overall, the instances that Poundstone shares are interesting and provide a great selection for trivia enthusiasts, but serious concerns arise, too, when one realizes that the least knowledgeable respondents (Where is Ukraine? When did that dinosaur live?) also often hold the strongest (and uninformed!) opinions on important issues like immigration and global warming. I have ordered a copy of Head in the Cloud for the new library since it could certainly serve as a starting point for some very stimulating arguments.
