A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method by Daniel J. Levitin

"I was already aware of many of the tricks used that are described in this book, but there was a good bit that I didn’t know as I never took a statistics course in school. This book does a good job of describing the stuff that will be helpful to see past the games that the media often play without a bunch of extra stuff that just confuses the whole idea. Really, some people might think they are better off not being so woke to the lies we are told every day but knowledge is never really a bad thing. The ways that numbers are manipulated that are described in this book are used quite often in our society. It helps to be able to learn to look at the numbers for yourself so you can do the math and know what is really going on, or that the statistics being reported to you cannot be true at all due to it being impossible to figure such things. Overall an eye opening book that I recommend to everyone even slightly interested in the truth. They should teach more of this in school but I’m afraid they don’t for a reason...."

전반부는 통계적 이야기가 주를 이루기 때문에 수리적 의미나 설명이 많은 편이다. 예로 세 가지 평균에 대한 의미와 오류등을 설명하고 속지 않고 이해하는 방법에 대해서 설명한다. 중후반은 서술적, 논리적 오류에 대한 내용이 중심이 된다. 다른 책들에서 비슷한 이야기를 읽은 경험이 있었기 때문에 몇 군데를 제외하고는 무난하게 진도가 나가는 편이었다. 문장이나 표현도 난해하지 않기 때문에 지루하지 않게 읽었다. 인터넷을 검색하면 중심 개념에 대한 설명도 참고할 수 있기 때문에 책의 내용을 이해하는데 큰 도움이 된다. 반복적으로 등장하는 핵심단어들에 대한 개념을 초반부터 정확하게 이해하는 게 중요하다.  

- Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations. And your interpretation may be just as good as, or better than, that of the person reporting them to you.

- ecological fallacy, exception fallacy......

- ... correlation does not imply causation ....

- .... evaluating claims includes asking the questions "Can we really know that?" and "How do they know that?"

- Theoretical probabilities are achieved only with an infinite number of trials. 

- Larger samles more acurately reflect the state of the world. Statisticians call this the law of large numbers.

- Thompson dubs something counterknowledge when it runs contrary to real knowledge and has some social currency.

- ..... people dramatically overweight the relative risks of things that receive media attention .... Misunderstanding of risk can lead us to ignore or discount evidence we could use to protect ourselves. 

- Probability .... is deductive .... Statistics is inductive .....

- .... four different pitfalls in critical thinking ; illusory correlation, belief perseverance, persuasion by association, logical fallcy 

- The unknown unknowns are the most dangerous...... somene doesn't allow for the possibility that they don't know everything ....one of the biggest causes of bad, even fatal, outcomes is belief in things that are untrue.

- Science doesn't present us with certainty, only probabilities....

- Science, history, and the news are full of things that we know, or thought we did, until we discovered we were wrong. An essential component of critical thinking is knowing what we don't know.....

- Counterknowledge and misinformation can be costly, in terms of lives and happiness, and in terms of the time spent trying to undo things that didn't go the way we thought they would. True knowledge simplifies our lives, helping us to make choices that increase our happiness and save time ....

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