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A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age QUOTES

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age QUOTES

1 " Be wary, though, of the way news media use the word “significant,” because to statisticians it doesn’t mean “noteworthy.” In statistics, the word “significant” means that the results passed mathematical tests such as t-tests, chi-square tests, regression, and principal components analysis (there are hundreds). Statistical significance tests quantify how easily pure chance can explain the results. With a very large number of observations, even small differences that are trivial in magnitude can be beyond what our models of change and randomness can explain. These tests don’t know what’s noteworthy and what’s not—that’s a human judgment. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

2 " 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. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

3 " Access is one of those words that should raise red flags when you encounter them in statistics. People having access to health care might simply mean they live near a medical facility, not that the facility would admit them or that they could pay for it. As you learned above, C-SPAN is available in 100 million homes, but that doesn’t mean that 100 million people are watching it. I could claim that 90 percent of the world’s population has “access” to Weaponized Lies by showing that 90 percent of the population is within twenty-five miles of an Internet connection, rail line, road, landing strip, port, or dogsled route. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

4 " Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as:
"On average, humans have one testicle. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

5 " A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

6 " Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

7 " It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —MARK TWAIN "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

8 " Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

9 " The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

10 " On average, humans have one testicle "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

11 " Just because someone quotes you a statistic or shows you a graph, it doesn’t mean it’s relevant to the point they’re trying to make. It’s the job of all of us to make sure we get the information that matters, and to ignore the information that doesn’t. "

― , A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age