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

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I have no idea why Ally McLeod was referred to. He wasn’t so much confident as simply deluded – surely there is a big difference. ii It was in Scotland and the ball went into a burn, as we say up there. A burn is a stream, not a lake.(In fact there is only one lake in Scotland, but that is another story.) The rise in cancer misinformation is part of a wider problem with online falsehoods. Like the equally dangerous explosion in anti-vaccine myths, cancer untruths have an impact on both our physical wellbeing and on the public understanding of science and medicine. In a sea of sound and fury, discerning between the reputable and the repugnant isn’t always easy, but there are excellent resources available for patients and their families. Well-researched guides by Cancer Research UK and the US National Cancer Institute are enlightening and authoritative.

This book teaches us how to identify the various forms of new-school bullshit: how to evaluate scientific claims, to distinguish between correlation and causation, to recognize biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, to identify selection biases in samples, to understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more. They also include lots of graphs and other data images so you can practice spotting screwy data representations yourself. Whether you are confused by the anti-vax movement, which grew out of a single retracted medical study, to the claim that Artificial Intelligence can infer sexual orientation from analyzing a photograph of a person’s face, there is no shortage of nutty ideas out there to contemplate and dissect.

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Self-confidence is not something you can choose to have. Self-confidence is like the confidence you have in other people, it is a result of experience. Why did it get the next one wrong? Is it because it wasn’t confident enough? No: it has correctly assessed that it will get it right 49 times out of 50. If the AI had said it was 99% confident, it would have been overconfident. The AI has learnt, from its experience of its own capabilities and the difficulty of the dog-cat-recognition task, that it gets it right 98% of the time. I love to conjure up tales mixed with adulterous acts, drama and action. I dabbled into the hells of this world we live in and found that it brought me some peace as well. While they were quoting Postman, I think it would have been nice if they had also quoted one of his explanations for why we are drowning in quite so much bullshit. And that is that a lot of bullshit comes down to us from things that really don’t matter in our lives at all, but that we have been made to believe we are deeply interested in. For example, a recent story has it that Melania Trump has a body double and that it was this double who was out and about campaigning with Donald during the election campaign. Even if this story was 100% verifiable, hand on Bible, true, and even if tomorrow video emerged of an actress named Jane Smithers, or something, pulling on a Melania-type dress and fake boobs – what possible difference could it make to any of our lives? It would just be one more crazy thing that happened in the Trump White House. That is, in a White House that has specialised in ensuring a dozen crazy things have happened every day for four years and all before morning tea on each of those days. Even if it was true, how would you knowing that bit of truth about the fake Melania change your world? I don’t know why the author of this paper would wish to change or stretch Harry Fowler’s insightful analytical definition of “Bullshit”.

All false claims betray the same basic misunderstanding, however: cancer is not a monolithic entity, but a family of more than 200 known diseases. Arising from mutations in a patient’s cells, cancer is extremely complex and diverse. It is highly unlikely that a single “magic bullet” could treat cancer in all its forms. The idea of a panacea is attractive, but woefully misguided, and a klaxon warning of dubious science. Unscientific interventions can nevertheless come with substantial price tags. And so with the arrival and US federal mismanagement of the pandemic, and the associated disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories, it turns out the release of Calling Bullshit is more timely than the authors imagined when they began their project years ago. Surely a better choice would have been a picture of David Cameron or one of the goons in Brussels, all of whom were ‘confident’ that the British would vote to remain in the EU. Or a picture of Hillary on the campaign trail in 2016. Or a picture of Guardiola, who was confident that his bizarre team selection would beat Chelsea the other night. On the other hand, I suppose all those examples might have disproved the message of the book. Bullshit isn't what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data. I think the day job needs some work too, for while I would take on board some of your criticisms, I am hugely distracted from doing so by the whiff of overconfident bullshit.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. I hope the ideas within are widely circulated, understood and applied by readers. If you're curious, I expect that your library already has this book available for you to browse, and to see what you think. Disinformation relies on trusted people in your social circle spreading bullshit. The bullshit propagates because people have emotion over a headline and repost without doing any vetting whatsoever. Computer generated faces are created now as profile pics for fake accounts and they can be very convincing. Bots are in fake real people with fake identities with a very real agenda who get retweeted by the likes of The New York Times. This is an entertaining book about recognizing bullshit, researching and calling it out. Much of the book describes the various types of bullshit, and the research required to snoop out its origin. Then, a short portion of the book is about calling it out; how to call it out, and even when to call it out. The book is filled with anecdotal bullshit, and the research the author used to ferret out its origin. Much of the bullshit is unintended--it is simply a matter of passing along incompetent analyses and conclusions. When bullshit is intentional--that is simply called lying.

Of course, the one I've read most recently is always the best...no, really, this one may be. Highly and indiscriminately recommended. We all need less bullshit to wade through, especially those of us who are reading while walking and might be more vulnerable by dint of just not paying attention. 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. Which is a shame. There is a fascinating book to be written by someone with a bit more self-reflection — someone a bit less confident, perhaps, in their thesis. Robertson divides confidence into two constituent parts: a “can happen” attitude and a “can do” attitude. If we’re trying to lose weight, say, someone might tell us to eat a healthier diet and take more exercise. So how can one hope to rid the world of increasing levels of bullshit? Since it’s easier to create bullshit than to refute it, simply refuting each new instance of bullshit seems like a losing battle. The better strategy is educational; if you can inoculate enough people against falling for bullshit in the first place, bullshit never gains enough traction to require costly efforts at refutation.

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If that person is trying to infect the listener with that confidence, or positive thinking,or belief – typically a politician communicating to concerned voters or a surgeon to a concerned patient) – I contend we’re still in the area of deception or deliberate exaggeration justified as for a good cause. I was wondering how much bullshit one person has to experience over the lifetime or even in a month. Anyway, this is a solid piece of work. Something that goes well beyond Darrell Huff's "How to lie with Statistics" and even more. 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).

The researchers make the important point that falsehoods are often simpler than the truth. That is why they are believed. But it remains important that scientists recognize there are specialist fields - and remarkable researchers - beyond their experience, expertise and vista. The tutorial system displayed on a bi-weekly basis who was intelligent and hard working. The conversation at hall dinner served the same purpose. The only snobbery I encountered was intellectual, people tended to sneer at those who only took an interest in their own subject, or who couldn’t keep up.

It is perhaps no surprise that the best sentence in this book reads "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." This is of course one of the best known and finest lines in English literature, although it is written not by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom the authors of this book attribute the quote, but rather by Gregory Rabassa. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote instead "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." 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. My experience is that generally speaking, the people most likely to be blessed with that most precious of resources – confidence – are those most likely to deny its relevance. People stigmatized by class, gender, race, physical appearance or disability seldom do this. White, male, middle-class, western, public-school-educated men (all like me except the class and education bits) are often blind to the crippling and undermining effects of low confidence and enormously advantageous effects of high confidence.