A Field Guide to Lies

Read Dec 2023. Sometimes belabored the point, but overall decently interesting.

Definitely learned stuff from this book but its not an entertaining tome and is drier than Levitin's other works.

A very basic yet all-encompassing and systematic look at how numbers and words are used in lies. Levitin goes through all the different ways one can obfuscate or twist the truth, trying to teach the reader on how to approach information more critically. A good companion to [b:How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking 18693884 How Not to Be Wrong The Power of Mathematical Thinking Jordan Ellenberg https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387726285s/18693884.jpg 26542434].

Given that I have a background in engineering, most of what this book describes is something I already saw during my course. But Levitin keeps it interesting with lots of examples.

You could argue reading this is timely in the lead up to the 2016 elections but it speaks to a nuance that is completely lacking in this particular campaign.

It's more about the skewing of stats, presenting information that favours your viewpoint, logical fallacies. And it ties it into Fox News polls, autism claims, 9/11 truthers, unknown unknowns and more.

And while the sly authorial voice does occasionally peek out it reads like a first year textbook. There's the missed potential to have more fun with this but it instead, seriously and perhaps appropriately given the nature of the book, resorts to cold hard logical truths and talks of bimodal distributions and Bayesian probability.

Still, 3 out of 4 dentists agree that this is better than 50% of the books out there.

A Great modern successor to how to lie with statistics.