A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (37 page)
Read A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age Online
Authors: Daniel J. Levitin
preparation for the breath holding for an article in the
New York Times
:
Tierney, J. (2008, April 22). This time, he’ll be left breathless.
New York Times
, p. F1.
the
Oprah
appearance in his blog
:
Tierney, J. (2008). David Blaine sets breath-holding record. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/david-blaine-sets-breath-holding-record.
Tierney writes, “I was there
”:
John Tierney, email correspondence, January 13 and 18, 2016.
Eventually all of the elements between 1 and 118
:
Netburn, D. (2016, Jan. 4). It’s official: four super-heavy elements to be added to the periodic table. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-new-elements-20160104-story.html.
Here’s Professor Harrison Prosper, describing this plot
:
Prosper, H. B. (2012, July 10). International Society for Bayesian Analysis. http://bayesian.org/forums/news/3648.
Louis Lyons explains “The Higgs
”:
Lyons, L. (2012, July 11). http://bayesian.org/forums/news/3648.
Although CERN officials announced in 2012
:
In articles on the Higgs boson, you may encounter reference to the 5-sigma standard of proof. Five-sigma refers to the level of probability that the scientists agreed upon before conducting the experiments—the chance of their misinterpreting the experiments had to have a confidence interval within five standard deviations (5-sigma), or 0.0000005 (recall earlier we talked about 95 and 99 percent confidence intervals—this is a confidence interval of 99.99995 percent). See http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/five-sigmawhats-that/.
Prosper says, “Given that the search
”:
Prosper, H. B. (2012, July 10). http://bayesian.org/forums/news/3648.
Physicist Mads Toudal Frandsen
adds
:
(2014, Nov. 7). Maybe it wasn’t the Higgs particle after all. Phys.org. http://phys.org/news/2014-11-wasnt-higgs-particle.html.
Joseph Lykken, a physicist and director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
:
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-wasnt-higgs-particle.html.
as
Wired
writer Signe Brewster says
:
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/physicists-are-desperate-to-be-wrong-about-the-higgs-boson/.
physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed told the
New York Times
:
Overbye, D. (2015, Dec. 16). Physicists in Europe find tantalizing hints of a mysterious new particle.
New York Times,
p. A16.
CONCLUSION: DISCOVERING YOUR OWN
A lot of things that should be scientific
:
These ideas and their phrasing come from: Frum, D. (2015). Talk delivered at the Colleges Ontario Higher Education Summit, November 16, 2015, Toronto, ON.
APPENDIX: APPLICATION OF BAYES’S RULE
To compute Bayes’s rule
:
Iversen, G. R. (1984).
Bayesian Statistical Inference.
Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, vol. 43. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The inspiration for this book came from Darrell Huff’s
How to Lie with Statistics
, a book that I’ve read several times and appreciate more with each reading. I was also a huge fan of Joel Best’s
Damned Lies and Statistics
, and Charles Wheelan’s
Naked Statistics
. I owe all three authors a great debt for their humor, wisdom, and insight, and I hope this book will take its place alongside theirs for anyone who wants to improve their understanding of critical thinking.
My agent, Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, is a dream: warm, attentive, supportive, and indefatigable. I feel privileged to work with her and her colleagues at TWA, Rebecca Nagel, Stephanie Derbyshire, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, and Celia Kokoris.
I am thankful to everyone at Dutton/Penguin Random House. Stephen Morrow has been my editor through four books and has made each of them incalculably better (P < .01). His guidance and support have been valuable. Thanks to Adam O’Brien, LeeAnn Pemberton, and Susan Schwartz. Hats off to Ben Sevier, Amanda Walker, and Christine Ball for the numerous things they do to help books reach readers who want to read them. Becky Maines was a wonderful more-than-a-copy-editor, whose breadth and depth of knowledge and clarifying additions I very much enjoyed.
I’m grateful to the following for helpful discussions and comments on drafts of this manuscript: Joe Austerweil, Heather Bortfeld, Lew Goldberg, and Jeffrey Mogil. For help with specific passages, I’m indebted to David Eidelman, Charles Fuller, Charles Gale, Scott Grafton, Prabhat Jha, Jeffrey Kimball, Howie Klein, Joseph Lawrence, Gretchen Lieb, Mike McGuire, Regina Nuzzo, Jim O’Donnell, James Randi, Jasper Rine, John Tierney, and the many colleagues of mine of the American Statistical Association who helped proof the book and review the examples, especially Timothy Armistead, Edward K. Cheng, Gregg Gascon, Edward Gracely, Crystal S. Langlais, Stan Lazic, Dominic Lusinchi, Wendy Miervaldis, David P. Nichols, Morris Olitsky, and Carla Zijlemaker. My students in McGill’s honors and independent research seminar helped provide some of the examples and clarified my thinking. Karle-Philip Zamor, as he has through four books, helped me enormously to prepare figures and solve all manner of technical problems, always with good cheer and great skill. Lindsay Fleming, my office assistant, has helped me to structure my time and keep my focus and assisted with the end notes, index, proofreading, fact-checking, and many other details of the book (and thanks to Eliot, Grace, Lua, and Kennis Fleming for sharing her time with me).
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Note: Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.
“access” (term usage),
61
accuracy of numbers,
60
–61
actors and product promotion,
135
Adams, Dennis,
156
albinism,
166
Aldrin, Buzz,
229
–231
Alexa.com,
143
alternative explanations,
152
–167
for ancient earthworks of Kazakhstan,
156
–58
and cherry-picking,
161
and control groups,
158
–160
in court cases,
155
–56
scientists’ consideration of,
249
and selective small samples,
164
–66
and selective windowing,
161
–64
anti-evolutionism,
170
anti-refugee sentiments,
203
anti-science bias,
252
anti-skepticism bias,
252
–53
arguments in science,
193
–94
Arkani-Hamed, Nima,
250
Armstrong, Neil,
229
–231
Associated Press (AP),
66
association, persuasion by,
176
–77,
210
atoms,
245
authority,
129
,
135
.
See also
experts and expertise
autism and vaccines,
182
,
207
,
207
–10
automobile accidents,
116
–17,
202
,
273
n116
averages,
11
–25
and bimodal distribution,
17
–18,
18
combining samples from disparate populations,
17
and common fallacies,
18
–20
mean,
11
–13,
17
,
18
–19,
21
,
265
n18
median,
11
,
12
–13,
17
,
18
,
19
,
265
n18
mode,
11
,
13
,
17
,
19
and range,
17
and shifting baselines,
20
–24,
22
,
23
and skewed distributions,
20
–21,
24
,
25
axes,
26
–42
choosing the scale and,
33
–35,
34
,
35
discontinuity in,
30
–33,
31
,
32
,
72
–73,
73
double Y-axis,
36
–42,
37
,
38
,
44
,
44
–45
truncated vertical,
28
–30,
29
unlabeled,
26
–28,
27
,
28
,
40
,
41
baselines for comparison,
7
,
21
–24,
22
,
23
,
56
