Weaponized Lies

American-Canadian cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s nonfiction book, Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era (2016), seeks to improve readers' cognitive thinking skills and ability to spot logical fallacies in an age when mass media and politicians spread a huge number of falsehoods. It was originally published under the title, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age.

Levitin's book is deeply concerned with the fake news, filter bubbles, and confirmation bias that has arguably been worsened by the Internet and the information age. He says some of the worst perpetrators of spreading false information are what he calls "pseudo-experts." He cites the popular advertisement of old that claims, "Four out of five dentists recommend Colgate." The author explains that while it may make sense on the surface for a dentist to be a trusted expert on what toothpaste to use, this is, actually, a logical fallacy. Dentists, he argues, don't spend their days comparing toothpaste products. If someone wanted to know which toothpaste works best, they'd be better off trusting a researcher in a lab conducting tests on how various toothpastes affect plaque build-up, enamel, and gum health.

Indeed, the Colgate example is an old one, and pseudo-experts, Levitin writes, have been around for much longer than the Internet. He cites William Shockley who won a Nobel Prize for Physics after he helped invent the transistor. Shockley was undoubtedly an intelligent physicist and so people listened when he shared his completely ill-informed and outright false opinions about how black people are genetically inferior when it comes to brainpower. Again, Shockley was a physicist, not a geneticist, but that didn't stop people from believing his hateful comments about black people, especially if they confirmed already held biases. The same is true of Charles Murray, who held similar views about black people and espoused them in a popular book called The Bell Curve. It is true that Murray is an accomplished sociologist. However, he is not a geneticist and therefore should not be looked to as an expert on genetic predispositions in black populations. "Expertise in a given field is narrow, and is not interchangeable with expertise in another realm," Levitin writes.



Another example is the pediatrician who was called in to testify in the case against Sally Clark. Two of Clark's infants had died at home, leading investigators to believe she killed them. The pediatrician testified that it is highly unlikely that two infants would die at home of natural causes in such a short time. However, it is precisely because of this unlikelihood that the pediatrician is a terrible person to look to as an expert on this subject. Because infants rarely die of natural causes at home, a pediatrician will know little about infant mortality. Better to have a coroner or epidemiologist testify. Indeed, such experts went on to exonerate Clark, but only after she had already served three years in prison for a crime she did not commit.

The problem is especially acute, Levitin says, when it comes to climate change deniers. The climate change deniers trotted out on television to add a false sense of equivalency to the "debate" on climate change are all smart people, but they are smart in fields such as physics or microbiology. Virtually none of them are actually climate scientists. How does Levitin know this? Because among climate scientist PhDs, 97 percent of them say that climate change is both real and manmade.

These problems are old, Levitin admits, but the information age has exacerbated them. While there are undoubtedly positive benefits to the democratization of information caused by the Internet, the lack of a central authority designed to sort truth from fiction has caused a proliferation of falsehoods that people nevertheless believe, especially if it conforms to their preconceived notions about the world. Levitin also admits that the increase in falsehoods is, in part, due to an increase in information overall. We have created more information in the past five years than during all of recorded history up to that point.



In some ways, Levitin's book reads like a self-help book, relaying lessons and tips readers can use to better ferret out truth from lies. According to Levitin, a new kind of media literacy is required to sort through the avalanche of information we face. Levitin reminds readers that the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because a number of anecdotes support a certain conclusion, that does not mean the conclusion is correct most of the time or even a significant amount of the time. Levitin also warns people against conflating correlation and causation. He cites the example of rising autism rates and rising vaccinations. Yes, autism has risen along with vaccinations. However, there is zero evidence to suggest that one has anything to do with the other.

According to The Globe and Mail, Weaponized Lies is "a smart, timely and massively useful primer for 'critical thinking in the information age.'"