Hey Players – Here's what we'll learn today:

• 📚 Defining Bullshit: Misinformation vs. lies.

• 📈 Decoding Data: Spotting misleading stats and visuals.

• 🌐 Digital Traps: The role of social media and clickbait.

• 💡 Critical Thinking Tools: Grasp probabilistic thinking and the importance of replication in studies.

• 🛡️ Stand Up with Ethics: How to call out misinformation right.

Happy reading!

Book of the Week

Calling Bullshit provides a toolkit to critically assess and debunk misinformation, especially in this age of vast data and rapid technological advancements. The book delves into how data, figures, and statistics can be manipulated or misinterpreted to mislead the public.

Key Principles

1. Definition of Bullshit

• Misleading information designed to impress.

• It is not necessarily false but crafted to deceive.

• It often sounds plausible but lacks genuine evidence.

2. Spotting Misleading Data

• Recognize too-good-to-be-true claims.

• Check sources of information.

• Beware of cherry-picked data.

  • Using a specific subset of data to support a claim while ignoring contradictory evidence.

• Graphs and charts can be deceiving.

  • A y-axis that doesn't start at zero can exaggerate differences.

3. Correlation vs. Causation

• Just because two variables move together doesn’t mean one causes the other.

  • Ice cream sales and shark attacks increase in summer, but one doesn't cause the other.

4. The Role of Social Media

• Social media can amplify misinformation.

• Echo chambers reinforce biases.

• Bots and fake accounts can boost numbers.

• Question viral stories' sources and authenticity.

5. Calling Bullshit

• Avoid personal attacks.

• Base challenges on facts, not personal biases.

• Strive for openness to being proven wrong.

• Always seek the truth, not win an argument.

Top Articles

A roundup of the week's most popular articles and essays from Playtext.

1. Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI (18 min)

2. Energy makes time (5 min)

3. On Craft (7 min)

4. Why I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency (14 min)

5. Intelligent vs. Smart (10 min)

Notes

• Want to read more books? Go to Playtext Books and explore 100+ books on Business, Science, and Productivity.

• Reading too many articles? Playtext turns Articles into Audiobooks so you can read 3x faster!

• Have a book recommendation? Reply to this email with the book you want to read. We are always looking for great books to read (: