Partial Truths

In this brilliant follow up to What Science Is and How It Really Works, James Zimring engages the reader in a kind of detective story about the classic mistakes of human reasoning, due to our innumeracy. From bad social policy to pandemics to terrorism, he shows how human decision making often gets it so wrong. What I loved most about Partial Truths though is that he didn't just establish that we make errors, but why. This amounts to a handy, insightful, eminently readable guide to the intricate evolution of the human mind itself. If you enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, you'll love this book. -- Lee McIntyre, author of <i>How to Talk to a Science Denier</i> Using the simple notion of a fraction as a lens, James Zimring insightfully discusses a remarkable variety of issues from cognitive psychology to New Age beliefs to misunderstandings in politics. Thoughtful and wide-ranging. -- John Allen Paulos, Temple University, and author of <i>A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper</i> and <i>Innumeracy</i> In Partial Truths, Zimring offers an entertaining and illuminating look at how we all misunderstand-and how the media and politicians misrepresent, and even scientists sometimes distort-the numbers and data that underlie so much of our conventional wisdom. -- David Zweig, author of <i>Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion</i> Zimring's book Partial Truths takes a walk through the various ways human cognition fails when dealing with numbers, probabilities, risk, and assessing evidence. Along the way, Zimring takes us through a bestiary of fascinating case studies both historical and modern. His clear prose illuminates the ways that politicians take advantage of our cognitive shortcomings, the ways that numbers mislead us in everyday life, and what this means for important social topics like racialized criminal justice, war mongering, and public belief in science. While Zimring follows previous authors in advocating for improved information literacy, he takes a more measured approach. Zimring is admirably aware of the ways that human cognition is hard to change, and recognizes that sometimes our reasoning biases actually benefit us, even as he helps the reader see these biases more clearly. A great book for those grappling with the confusion of our modern information environments. -- Cailin O'Connor, author of <i>The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread</i> Numbers become far more than abstractions in the capable hands of James Zimring. I learned something fascinating and enlightening on nearly every page of Partial Truths - about politics, social policy, economics, cultural choices, criminal justice, and much more. -- Steven Lubet, author of <i>Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters</i>