Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era Read online

  Praise for Weaponized Lies, previously published as A Field Guide to Lies

  Winner of the 2016 Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction

  “Daniel Levitin’s field guide is a critical-thinking primer for our shrill, data-drenched age. It’s an essential tool for really understanding the texts, posts, tweets, magazines, newspapers, podcasts, op-eds, interviews, and speeches that bombard us every day. From the way averages befuddle to the logical fallacies that sneak by us, every page is enlightening.”

  —Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better

  “The world is awash with data, but not always with accurate information. [Levitin’s book] does a terrific job of illustrating the difference between the two with precision—and delightful good humor.”

  —Charles Wheelan, senior lecturer and policy fellow, Rockefeller Center, Dartmouth College; author of Naked Economics

  “Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin lays out the many ways in which each of us can be fooled and misled by numbers and logic, as well as the modes of critical thinking we will need to overcome this.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Valuable tools for anyone willing to evaluate claims and get to the truth of the matter.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This useful, entertaining, and highly readable guide is ready to arm everyday citizens with the tools to combat the spread of spurious, and often ridiculous, information.”

  —Library Journal

  “A book you may want to have close by at all times.”

  —Success Magazine

  “Serves as a kind of Strunk and White for sloppy thinkers.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Entertaining and filled with helpful hints. . . . A valuable tool for navigating the daily data onslaught.”

  —The Mercury News (San Jose)

  “Smart and humorous. . . . The tools anyone needs to tell good information from bad are in this definitive guide to critical thinking.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “Exceptional. . . . Practical and essential advice.”

  —Big Think

  “An entertaining, user-friendly primer on evaluating data wisely.”

  —Washington Independent Review of Books

  “This is a wonderful book. It covers so many of the insights of science, logic, and statistics that the public needs to know, yet are sadly neglected in the education that most of us receive.”

  —Edward K. Cheng, Tarkington Chair of Teaching Excellence, professor of law, Vanderbilt University Law School

  “Hits on the most important issues around statistical literacy and uses good examples to illustrate its points. I could not put this book down. Reading it has been a pleasure, believe me. I am so impressed with Levitin’s writing style, which is clear and simple, unlike much of the murky stuff that is written by statisticians and many others.”

  —Morris Olitsky, former vice president, Market Research and Analysis, Prudential Financial; statistician, USDA

  “Insightful and entertaining—an excellent work.”

  —Gregg Gascon, Biomedical Informatics, the Ohio State University

  “Just as Strunk and White taught us how to communicate better, [this book] is an indispensable guide to thinking better. As Big Data becomes a dominant theme in our culture, we are all obliged to sharpen our critical thinking so as to thwart the forces of obfuscation. Levitin has done a great service here.”

  —Jasper Rine, professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development, UC Berkeley

  “Not since Huff’s classic How to Lie with Statistics has a book so clearly described how numbers can be used to deceive and misdirect. Levitin shows how to critically evaluate claims that charlatans, the media, and politicians would have us believe.”

  —Stan Lazic, team leader in Quantitative Biology, AstraZeneca

  “A must-read! Professor Levitin convinces the reader why critical thinking has become even more crucial in the information age. As we are consistently bombarded with information, let’s question its veracity and acquire the tools to analyze it.”

  —Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, dean and professor of finance, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University

  “Well researched, and provides a valuable guide to assist the public with a methodology for evaluating the truth behind this cacophony of information that constantly inundates.”

  —Patrick Martin, magician

  “A valuable primer on critical thinking that convincingly illustrates the prevalence of misinformation in everyday life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Levitin’s] finger is on the pulse of the zeitgeist. . . . A very helpful guide to the way that news organizations can misuse information, from statistics to maps to graphs.”

  —The Seattle Review of Books

  “Smart, timely, and massively useful.”

  —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “Regardless of one’s political persuasion (apolitical, third party, democratic, or republican), all individuals of this nation would benefit from making the effort to read and understand the concepts presented in this book. Eminently easy to read.”

  —Portland Book Review

  “Levitin talks about the crucial role of critical thinking and seeking out the truth in today’s media landscape.”

  —NPR’s Forum/Michael Krasny

  “A guide for those who wish to test the authenticity of information that inundates us from every corner, dark and light, of the Web.”

  —The Washington Post

  “The timing could not be better. . . . A survival manual for the post-factual era. Levitin offers a set of intellectual tools to help distinguish the real from the unreal, and often surreal.”

  —Literary Review of Canada

  “Much like Nate Silver’s (New York Times bestselling!) The Signal and the Noise, Levitin’s is that rare book that makes statistics both understandable and at times even intriguing.”

  —Maclean’s

  “Misinformation is a curse of the information age, and Levitin offers blow-by-blow demonstrations of how words, numbers, and graphics can be manipulated to distort truth.”

  —Stanford Magazine

  Also by Daniel J. Levitin

  This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

  The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

  The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Previously published as a Dutton hardcover, September 2016, as A Field Guide to Lies

  First paperback printing, March 2017

  Copyright © 2016 by Daniel J. Levitin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  All art courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

  Images here, here, here, here, and here © 2016 by Dan Piraro, used by permission.

/>   Image here drawn by Dan Piraro based on an image by Irving Geiss in “How to Lie with Statistics,” © 1954.

  Image here © 2016 by Alex Tabarrok, used by permission.

  Image here was drawn by the author, based on a figure under Creative Commons license appearing on www.betterposters.blogspot.com.

  Image here © 2016 by Tyler Vigen, used by permission.

  Image here was redrawn by the author with permission, based on a figure found at AutismSpeaks.org.

  Image here is public domain and provided courtesy of Harrison Prosper.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524742225

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

  Names: Levitin, Daniel J., author.

  Title: [Weaponized lies, formerly titled] A field guide to lies : critical thinking in the information age / Daniel J. Levitin.

  Description: New York : Dutton, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007356 | ISBN 9780525955221 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101983829 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Critical thinking. | Fallacies (Logic) | Reasoning.

  Classification: LCC BC177 .L486 2016 | DDC 153.4/2—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007356

  Printed in the United States of America

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  To my sister Shari, whose inquisitive mind made me a better thinker

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Weaponized Lies

  Also by Daniel J. Levitin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Thinking, Critically

  PART ONE: EVALUATING NUMBERS

  Plausibility

  Fun with Averages

  Axis Shenanigans

  Hijinks with How Numbers Are Reported

  How Numbers Are Collected

  Probabilities

  PART TWO: EVALUATING WORDS

  How Do We Know?

  Identifying Expertise

  Overlooked, Undervalued Alternative Explanations

  Counterknowledge

  PART THREE: EVALUATING THE WORLD

  How Science Works

  Logical Fallacies

  Knowing What You Don’t Know

  Bayesian Thinking in Science and in Court

  Four Case Studies

  Conclusion: Discovering Your Own

  Appendix: Application of Bayes’s Rule

  Glossary

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THINKING, CRITICALLY

  I’m going to start by saying two things that will surely make some people very mad. First, the language we use has begun to obscure the relationship between facts and fantasy. Second, this is a dangerous by-product of a lack of education in our country that has now affected an entire generation of citizens. These two facts have made lies proliferate in our culture to an unprecedented degree. It has made possible the weaponizing of lies so that they can all the more sneakily undermine our ability to make good decisions for ourselves and for our fellow citizens.

  What has happened to our language? The Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016 was post-truth, which they define as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” It was selected because its usage skyrocketed during that year. I believe we need to get back to using plain old “truth” again—and fast. And we need to reject the idea that truth doesn’t exist anymore.

  We are all being more than a bit too careful in how we refer to falsehoods. Perhaps in an effort to avoid personal confrontations, an effort to “just get along,” we have started to use euphemisms to refer to things that are just plain whack-a-do crazy. The lie that the Washington, DC, pizza shop Comet Ping Pong was running a sex-slave operation spearheaded by Hillary Clinton led Edgar M. Welch, twenty-eight, of Salisbury, North Carolina, to drive 350 miles from his home to Washington, DC, and fire his semiautomatic weapon inside the pizzeria on Sunday, December 4, 2016 (just days after “post-truth” became the word of the year). The New York Daily News called the lie a “fringe theory.” A theory, by the way, is not just an idea—it is an idea based on a careful evaluation of evidence. And not just any evidence—evidence that is relevant to the issue at hand, gathered in an unbiased and rigorous fashion.

  Other euphemisms for lies are counterknowledge, half-truths, extreme views, alt truth, conspiracy theories, and, the more recent appellation, “fake news.”

  The phrase “fake news” sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test. These euphemisms obscure the fact that the sex-slave story is an out-and-out lie. The people who wrote it knew that it wasn’t true. There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists—and the rest of us—must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have a fact-based opposing side. Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.

  Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Maybe journalists don’t want to call “fake news” what it is, a lie, because they don’t want to offend the liars. But I say offend them! Call them on the carpet.

  What has been happening to our educational systems and institutions in the run-up to the post-truth era? The number of books students read on average declines steadily every single year after second grade. Already fifteen years ago, the U.S. Department of Education found that more than one in five adult Americans were not even able to locate information in text or “make low-level inferences using printed materials.” We have apparently failed to teach our children what constitutes evidence and how to evaluate it. This is worthy of our outrage. Edgar Welch, the Comet Ping Pong shooter, told authorities that he was “investigating” the conspiracy theory after reading about it online. Our information infrastructure is powerful. It can do good or it can do harm. And each of us needs to know how to separate the two.

  Welch may have thought in one way or another that he was investigating, but there is no evidence that any true investigating took place. It appears that this ignorant citizen does not know what it is to compile and evaluate evidence. In this case, one might look for a link between Hillary Clinton and the restaurant, behaviors of Clinton that would suggest an interest in running a prostitution ring, or even a motive for why she might benefit from such a thing (certainly the motive could not have been financial, given the recent kerfuffle over her speaking fees). He might have observed whether there were child prostitutes and their customers coming in and out of the facility. Or, lacking the mentality and education to conduct one’s own investigation, one could rely on professionals by reading what trained investigative journalists have to say about the story. The fact that no dedicated professional journalist gives this any credence should tell you a lot. I understand that there are people who think that journalists are corrupt and co-opted by the government. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are 45,790 reporters and corresponde
nts. The American Society of News Editors, an independent trade group, estimates there are 32,900 reporters working for the nearly 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Some journalists may well be corrupt, but with this many of them, it’s very unlikely that they all are.

  Facebook is making an effort to live up to its social responsibilities as a source of information by “making it easier for its 1.8 billion members to report fake news.” In other words, to call a lie a lie. Perhaps other social media sites will take an increasingly curatorial role in the future. At the very least, we can hope that their role in weaponizing lies will decrease.

  Many news organizations looked into where the story of the sex-slave pizzeria originated. NBC reported on a thriving community of “fake news” fabricators in the town of Veles, Macedonia, who could well have been the source. This region was in communist Yugoslavia until 1991. BuzzFeed and the Guardian found more than 100 fake news domain names originating there. Young people in Veles, without any political affiliation to US political parties, are pushing stories based on lies so that they can garner significant payments from penny-per-click advertising on platforms such as Facebook. Teenagers can earn tens of thousands of dollars in towns that offer little economic opportunity. Should we blame them for the gunshots in the pizzeria? Social networking platforms? Or a US educational system that has created citizens complacent about thinking through the claims we encounter every day?

  You might object and say, “But it’s not my job to evaluate statistics critically. Newspapers, bloggers, the government, Wikipedia, etc., should be doing that for us.” Yes, they should, but they don’t always, and it’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up as the number of lies proliferates faster than they can knock them down. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The Pizzagate story received more than one million hits, while its debunking by Snopes received fewer than 35,000. We are fortunate to have a free press; historically, most nations have had much worse. We should never take the media’s freedom and integrity for granted. Journalists and the companies that pay them will continue to help us identify lies and defuse them, but they can’t accomplish this on their own—the lies will win if we have a gullible, untrained public consuming them.