Alex Edmans's Blog - Posts Tagged "critical-thinking"
New Book: May Contain Lies
I'm delighted to announce my new book, "May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It", which Penguin Random House will be publishing in April. Here's the blurb:
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Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, business leaders, and best-selling authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.
In this eye-opening book, Alex Edmans, an economist and professor at London Business School, teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colourful examples – from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory, to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death – Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.
Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics – the science of cause and effect – ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically.
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It's based on my TED talk, "What to Trust in a Post-Truth World". One of its key features in the Ladder of Misinference, which lays out the different ways we can be misled:
We often focus on the first step up the ladder - "A statement is not fact: it may not be accurate". We know to check the facts (e.g. Obama’s birth certificate), and some social media sites allow you to click on a link to check a fact. But the punchline of the book is that checking the facts is not enough. Even if facts are 100% accurate, they may still be misleading due to the other three steps:
• A fact is not data: it may not be representative if it’s selectively quoted. Someone could trumpet a smoker who lived to 100, but hide the thousands of others who died from their habit.
• Data is not evidence: it may not be conclusive if it’s correlation without causation. People who eat whole grains are less likely to have heart disease. But people who choose to eat whole grains may lead healthier lives in general, and this could be causing the lower heart disease, rather than whole grains being a superfood.
• Evidence is not proof: it may not be universal if it’s in a different context. The Marshmallow Studies showed that kids who resist eating a marshmallow do better in life. But they focused on Stanford University children. Kids of less wealthy backgrounds may be better off eating whatever food is available, since it may not be there tomorrow.
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Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, business leaders, and best-selling authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.
In this eye-opening book, Alex Edmans, an economist and professor at London Business School, teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colourful examples – from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory, to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death – Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.
Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics – the science of cause and effect – ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically.
---
It's based on my TED talk, "What to Trust in a Post-Truth World". One of its key features in the Ladder of Misinference, which lays out the different ways we can be misled:
We often focus on the first step up the ladder - "A statement is not fact: it may not be accurate". We know to check the facts (e.g. Obama’s birth certificate), and some social media sites allow you to click on a link to check a fact. But the punchline of the book is that checking the facts is not enough. Even if facts are 100% accurate, they may still be misleading due to the other three steps:
• A fact is not data: it may not be representative if it’s selectively quoted. Someone could trumpet a smoker who lived to 100, but hide the thousands of others who died from their habit.
• Data is not evidence: it may not be conclusive if it’s correlation without causation. People who eat whole grains are less likely to have heart disease. But people who choose to eat whole grains may lead healthier lives in general, and this could be causing the lower heart disease, rather than whole grains being a superfood.
• Evidence is not proof: it may not be universal if it’s in a different context. The Marshmallow Studies showed that kids who resist eating a marshmallow do better in life. But they focused on Stanford University children. Kids of less wealthy backgrounds may be better off eating whatever food is available, since it may not be there tomorrow.
