Event details
Agenda
5.00-6.00pm – Registration/Tea and coffee
6.00-6.05pm – Introduction
6.05-6.30pm – Alex’s presentation of the book
6.30-6.50pm – Alex and Matthew Stadlen will discuss the book
6.50-7.00pm – Q&A from the audience
7.00pm onwards – Drinks reception. Complimentary signed copies of the book will be available.
The Book
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. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and take better decisions.
The Author
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World” and the TEDx talks “The Pie-Growing Mindset” and “The Social Responsibility of Business” with a combined 2.8 million views. He has won 25 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. Alex’s first book, “Grow the Pie”, was featured in the Financial Times books of the year. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Matthew Stadlen
Matthew Stadlen is a TV and radio presenter, political commentator, author and journalist. He spent nearly nine years at the BBC, where he programme edited the BBC One political programme, This Week, and presented and produced the documentary series On The Road With and the interview series Five Minutes With. He moved on to write The Matthew Stadlen Interview column for The Telegraph, before hosting his own weekend radio shows on LBC for four years. He is the host of the 20 Questions With podcast, has fronted 400 events on stage, and appears almost daily across a range of national TV channels where he gives his political analysis. Matthew is also the author of How To See Birds, which showcases his bird photography.
Any views expressed by the speakers are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Brevan Howard Centre, Imperial College Business School or any of their sponsors.