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

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One particularly valuable section focus on the issues with the p-value used in many scientific papers, for example how, while this can (with certain biases) answer a question about the probability that the null hypothesis is true, a failure of the null hypothesis is then often used to confirm one particular alternative hypothesis, which is a different question altogether. Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade or impress an audience by distracting, overwhelming, or intimidating them with a blatant disregard for truth, logical coherence, or what information is actually being conveyed. So creating bullshit is easy; refuting it is hard. And it is precisely this asymmetry that explains why bullshit persists and how it can even grow over time. 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.

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? 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? This, in essence, is the goal of the book. The authors want to immunize you against bullshit, with a focus on the quantitative variety. While it’s relatively easy to identify old-school bullshit based on flowery language and empty rhetoric, new-school bullshit is more insidious and sophisticated with its use of statistics, charts, graphs, and scientific-sounding claims. This is the bullshit that is more persuasive, harder to refute, and ultimately more dangerous. 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). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

In the wake of a measles resurgence driven in part by online anti-vaccine activism, several social media platforms have promised to massage their algorithms to reduce “fake news” on cancer. But this filtering is easily bypassed. Social media business models thrive on engagement rather than veracity, and a cynic might think they have little reason to regulate such content, beyond appearing to be concerned. Whether the problem is absence of ability or inclination, health misinformation remains widespread. It’s imperative we improve our ability to assess the avalanche of medical claims: our continued wellbeing depends on it. 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.’ 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. 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. Booster shots. This is a good one. Like many others, the authors have feared to be dry or boring and in consequence are entertaining as hell. These guys have had a live audience to practice on so they are particularly clear, straightforward, and spot on.

The mandala workshop bore many of the tell-tale signs of bullshit. The session was empty of facts and full of abstractions. Participants skipped between buzzwords such as ‘authenticity’, ‘self-actualisation’ and ‘creativity’. I found it impossible to attribute meaning to this empty talk. The harder I tried, the less sense it made. So, during the event, I politely played along. A very useful little book that provides techniques for detecting and calling out both bullshit and lies, with a particular focus on quantitative science. 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. So here's the beginning...I have some posts in mind and I'm open to suggestions. If there's something you want me to speak on particular, let me know and I'll do so thoughtfully.

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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). I'm giving this four stars and probably only skipping the fifth because of the pop title which undercuts the seriousness of the topic, IMO. Logic and Rhetoric have all but disappeared from educational programs when they were once mandated. Misinformation, disinformation and the manipulation of information seem more pervasive since, and I could claim a causal relationship, but would I be correct? It doesn't matter. What matters is that one understands what determines a causal relationship from a non-causal one and without supporting data my statement is just about as valid as what one gets from many usual sources of information. Bergeron and West have adapted for this book the material from a college course they taught of the same name of the same name at University of Washington in 1917. More about this can be seen at https://www.callingbullshit.org/FAQ.html

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. Neither self-confidence nor self-discipline is something you simply can choose to have. But both of them can nevertheless be built over time. Ultimately, however, the will to do THAT I guess depends on your urge to live (well). (And can you choose that?) So why bother “calling bullshit”? As the authors assert, adequate bullshit detection is essential for the survival of democracy. Regardless of political ideologies, democracy has always relied on a critically thinking electorate, and this intellectual skill is more important than ever in this modern age of online information warfare. It also is critically important for proper functioning of any social group, whether it is a small group of friends or some other social group, or a professional community. 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. 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).

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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. The authors then take the reader on a tour of quantitative fallacies with several examples, all explained clearly and with humor. The reader will learn how to differentiate between correlation and causation, spot biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, identify selection biases in samples, understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more. The reader will also learn how to properly evaluate scientific claims, and how the anti-vaxx movement is based on a single, thoroughly-debunked scientific study that massively confuses correlation with causation, among many other problems. 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.