Daniel Levitin, Ph.D.
Dean of Social Sciences at the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and faculty member, Center for Executive Education, UC Berkeley
Transforming Education: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies, and it’s becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. In his brand-new book A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age, New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician, and record producer, shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways information is distorted, both intentionally or not.
How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Dr. Levitin groups his field guide into two categories, statistical information and faulty arguments, ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. In particular, students of all ages need to think critically about the words and numbers they encounter if they want to be successful in school, at play, and at work. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning of the information we encounter rather than passively accepting information, repeating it, and making ill-informed decisions.

Upcoming Events
Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal
Bettina L. Love, Ph.D.
William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University
Ganae McAlpin-Toney
Director of Equity for Evanston Township High School D202
ON ZOOM
The Book of (More) Delights: A Conversation with Ross Gay
Ross Gay
Award-winning New York Times bestselling author
Adrian Matejka
Award-winning poet and Editor of Poetry magazine
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better
Myisha Cherry, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside
Danté Stewart
Theologian, essayist, cultural critic, and author
ON ZOOM