Bad Advice: How to Survive and Thrive in an Age of Bullshit

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Most of this book is stuff that I (and probably many readers) am familiar with intellectually but don't necessarily apply reflexively whenever I read the news or hear a statistic. So for me, this book was really useful in that it primed me to intentionally be on the defensive about common misrepresentations in statistics and data visualization. Four errors in this section, in my humble opinion, after investigation. Quite a lot for just part of one sentence! But by filling the heads of his fans — and the media outlets they consume — with a steady diet of bullshit, Trump is nonetheless succeeding in endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics, corroding America’s governing institutions, and poisoning civic life.” I also think that’s what justifies Donald Trump’s picture. His overconfidence has done him far more harm than good. There is increasing concern that such fictions risk eclipsing reputable information. Macmillan Cancer Support recently appointed a nurse specifically to debunk online stories, prompting the Lancet Oncology to comment: “How has society got to this point, where unproven interventions are being chosen in preference to evidence-based, effective treatments? Unfortunately, disinformation and – frankly – lies are widely propagated and with the same magnitude as verified evidence.” Radiotherapy and chemotherapy are dismissed by charlatans as poisons, imperilling lives

Essentially, while doing the shopping in Rita’s Kabin* or whatever, one character would relate to another character a story of two correlated events (or a specific phenomenon or state of mind/nature and an outcome). They would then suggest that the correlation is the causation. The other character would scratch their chin, consider their story, and say ‘Ah, but correlation is not causation’ before positing a more likely explanation for the event/outcome. When you’re heartbroken, what do you hear? You can’t love anyone until you love yourself. When someone’s hurt you? Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission. When you’re just a little too positive? Expectations lead to disappointment. Skepticism is important, and so I applaud these professors in their mission to fight BS, and much of what they talk about is important and true. But a lot of it is esoteric trivial examples. I'm disappointed because I was looking for a book on how to beat the very dangerous bullshit threatening the world today (in areas like pandemics). Wittgenstein’s response seems not just odd, but rude. So why did the great philosopher do this? Frankfurt’s answer is that throughout his life ‘Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combatting what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “non-sense”.’ Wittgenstein is ‘disgusted’ by Pascal’s remark because ‘it is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality’. She is ‘not even concerned whether her statement is correct’. If we were to react like Wittgenstein whenever we were faced with bullshit, our lives would probably become very difficult indeed.The replication crisis is not confined to psychology, Tom – it’s as bad or worse in biomedicine ( https://slate.com/technology/2016/04/biomedicine-facing-a-worse-replication-crisis-than-the-one-plaguing-psychology.html). Stanislaw Burzynski in 1997 at the federal courthouse in Houston, Texas, where he faced 34 charges of mail fraud, which were dismissed, and 41 of violating FDA regulations, upon which the jury failed to reach a verdict. Photograph: Pat Sullivan/AP

And you airily sweep away entire careers of careful scientists researching apparently ‘soft’ subjects with careless, inaccurate words like ‘debunked’. If there's one problem with this book is that the actual 'calling bullshit' part is very short, some tools are presented and some caveats described (i.e., don't be the 'well actually' guy, only call out bullshit if there's an actual problem, not to try and make yourself look smart). I guess you could write an entirely different book on tools and techniques on the discussion and public dismantling of bullshit. At first I thought this was going to be a rehash of all the other books out there on cognitive biases, but it turned out to include quite a few things I haven't heard articulated very well, like how the scientific process and publishing industry work, and about AI and big data (this section was excellent). This is a book I could happily recommend to others as a primer on critical thinking and spotting, ahem, bullshit, especially on the internet. The authors did a really good job of not making it (much) about pet theories, but about general principles that can be applied to all theories. They also avoided taking political sides which, in this day and age, is amazing. Sometimes we need help on the basic shit. The simple stuff because even though it is just that easy....when is it ever really just that easy?

There are dozens of things like this. People who are pessimistic die young, people who are less confident in their memory are more likely to get dementia, people who walk more slowly are less confident in their health and will therefore die young. The possibility that people are accurately judging their own health status is occasionally raised but then dismissed. (Sometimes the studies controlled for other possibilities, but did they control for enough ?) There's a chapter on causality and the authors mention smoking and cancer as a "clear-cut" causal link. But that's no explanation: just saying it's obvious should ring bullshit alarms. It would have been instructive to explain how we know that smoking causes cancer. We do know that. It is true. It can be explained to people. You can show them the overwhelming evidence. You can explain the Uncle Norbert fallacy. But that takes time. More importantly, getting citizens or even doctors to read the original science is not how the progress in tobacco control was achieved. Spin. Fake News. Conspiracy theories. Lies. We are daily confronted with a stinking quagmire of misinformation, disinformation and fact-free drivel. How do we sort the truth from the lies? This is the premise of the timely new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Allen Lane/Random House, 2020), a book that effectively acts as a field guide to the art of scepticism. iii To me repeatedly is not twice. If you say he failed repeatedly – nah, that is not just twice. Harrington put his ball in the lake – sorry, burn – twice.

There is a surfeit of ‘trade books’ about science which promote one ‘thing’ (confidence, a particular hormone, the effects of a single personality, one particular substance) and ignore everything else. You can argue that science is obliged to tease out particular factors and discount the rest. It can be an interesting read. Interesting how this could feed into the article on ‘posh at Oxford’ and the difference in state and private school graduates. Despite negative publicity, it’s business as usual for Burzynski. If anything, crowdfunding may have made his clinic more popular. In lieu of scientific evidence, it relies on gushing testimonials to lure new customers, though in some cases, these come from patients already deceased – a fact absent from the promotional material.So after surfing the web to find a blank template for the well known Dummies novels....I thought it was both humorous and appropriate.

This is a very important book to read right now. I highly recommend reading it as soon as possible. What Bergstrom and his colleague accomplishes in "Calling Bullshit" is a blueprint of all the various ways in which lies, exaggerations, contextualizations and data misrepresentation flood the media sphere and have completely corrupted truth. The authors do distinguish outright lying – where the liar goes to some length to make their lie believable - from bullshitting, where the shitter doesn’t even care whether you believe them or not, but that isn’t the main point of the book. A particularly good example is Wakefield’s dangerous and fallacious vaccine-autism link.Instead of following Wittgenstein’s example, there are ways we can politely call bullshit. The first step is to calmly ask what the evidence says. This is likely to temper our interlocutors’ views, even if the results are inconclusive. The second step is to ask about how their idea would work. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale University found that when they asked subjects to tell them, on a scale of 1 to 7, how they would rate their knowledge about everyday objects such as toilets, most people would say about 4 or 5. But when asked to describe precisely how a toilet worked, they dropped the rating of their own toilet expertise to below 3. Asking over-confident bullshitters exactly how their idea might work is another way to slow them down. Finally, ask the bullshitter to clarify what he means. Often, bullshit artists rely on ‘zombie nouns’ such as ‘globalisation’, ‘facilitation’ and ‘optimisation’. Pushing beyond linguistic boondoggles helps everyone to see what is solid and what is clothed in ornamental talk. I have long thought that there ought to be a vaguely educational TV show called Correlation Street, with each episode lasting two or three minutes. In a short aside in his book On Bullshit (2005), Frankfurt describes an interaction between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Fania Pascal, Wittgenstein’s friend and Russian teacher. ‘I had my tonsils out and was in Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself,’ Pascal wrote. ‘Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.”’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was disgusted: ‘You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.’ If I told you that in the Andes, they’d discovered a new species of humanoid that lived only 30,000 years ago, would you be certain that was bullshit? Or what if I told you that Honeywell are working on trapped ions because they think they are likely to prove to be more effective qubits than superconducting loops? The problem is with how the media has trained us throughout our lives. It makes our swallowing bullshit virtually inevitable. Look, I’d even read The God Particle, but not even I suspected the whole world would get quite so excited when the Higgs Boson was discovered. And this is because we live in a world where people are more interested in facts than narratives, in whats over whys. Even things that are definitely ‘true’ become bullshit when we have no context with which to understand them in. I mean, if you can’t tell me what the Higgs Boson does while it is grazing in the particle zoo, maybe your knowing it ‘exists’ doesn’t really matter.