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

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Therefore it is a little disturbing to think of a person who is good at self-judgement and poor regarding self-discipline with a correspondingly low self-confidence. Low self-confidence would seldom, I think, be the result of an accurate estimate of your condition on the matter in question + your just as accurate understanding of your (poor) self-discipline. This point it seems to me that both Robertson and his critic are missing. 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.

Then there is the misleading biases in data visualization. After the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law was enacted, a figure seemed to show at first glance, a drop in homicides. A close look at the vertical axis shows that it was inverted, giving the wrong impression. It turns out that the author of the figure did not intend to mislead, but used an unfortunate representation of the truth. 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.

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." Despite my complaints (some of which are probably beyond the authors’ control), Calling Bullshit presents a thoughtful, careful and engaging deconstruction about how to spot and disprove nonsense. It should be required reading for high school and university students as well as for any thinking person who is working to identify questionable news sources and stories, and navigate their way around social media in these weird times. 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. 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. Or take all of the recent excitement about the discovery of water on the moon. Or when so many very old celebrities die. Like when I found out Vera Lynn had died. My first reaction wasn’t “oh god, that’s terrible – we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…” it was rather, “But, didn’t she die years ago? She must have, the journalist has just got the names stuffed up. It’s probably Doris Day who has died.” And this is all part of the reason why we are so easily fooled – the truth is that Lynn or Day, it hardly matters at all to our real lives.

Technology has made the bullshit problem much worse. Forget the all-seeing eye of AI and tech, if you start out with garbage training programs for the algorithm, you will get garbage out. Is it any wonder that a paper claiming to recognize criminality from a picture would produce nothing but utter bullshit if the input data was headshots of non-criminals and MUGSHOTS of convicted criminals?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.

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. 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. More generally, it regularly quotes studies which seemed odd — so I went and looked about two dozen of them up. Studies into things like whether wearing a lab coat makes you better at concentrating, or whether being told that you’re smarter makes your brain look different in an fMRI scanner. Time after time, it was an unpreregistered study looking at 27 undergraduates which barely reached statistical significance. I am, I’m afraid, extremely not confident that most of these studies would replicate (and several of them definitely have not).

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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.

That pseudoscience is being hawked to vulnerable patients isn’t a new problem – cancer scams have existed for decades, and combating them was the impetus behind the 1939 Cancer Act. The substantial difference now is the ease with which falsehoods can be disseminated. Cancer surgeon David Gorski, professor of surgery and oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan and managing editor of the online journal Science-Based Medicine, notes that cancer misinformation is “way more prevalent now for the same reason other misinformation and conspiracy theories are so prevalent – because they’re so easily spread on social media.” The authors are expert guides. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist who researches how information flows through biological and social networks. Jevin West is a data scientist who studies misinformation in science and society. Together, they teach a popular undergraduate class offered under the same name by the University of Washington.

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. 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.’ 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 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.