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

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The whole of this article is summed up in the motto taught in statistics courses directed at behavioral scientists: correlation is not causation. This, I would say, goes in particular for the self-discipline part of self-confidence. Do you have confidence in your self-discipline? Do you take your decisions seriously after AND BEFORE you have taken them? The book ends with a couple summary chapters on how to spot and refute bullshit, and also on the difference between calling legitimate bullshit and becoming what the authors refer to as a “well-actually guy.” Perhaps the most important point of the book is the idea that the goal of calling bullshit is not to demonstrate your intelligence and puff up your ego; it’s to counter the spread of misinformation in the world and its direct and indirect consequences. 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.

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you [thereafter], save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not sole, purpose of education. 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.But this focus on facts and skills [in STEM teaching] comes at the expense of training and practice in the art of critical thinking. In the humanities and the social sciences, students are taught to smash conflicting ideas up against one another and grapple with discordant arguments. in STEM fields, students seldom are given paradoxes that they need to resolve, [...] or fallacious claims that they need to critique. It mostly focuses on the bullshit that is presented in the form of information or anything that we tend to consume to act upon or make decisions. And sometimes we ourselves create bullshit too. My favorite part is the scetion on Technically True things. Some professions actually require this skill of generating technically true statements and they serve so many purposes. I am in love with every part of this book, everyone! It is not just a typical self-help book that the readers can find on any bookshelf. Yet it is a masterpiece that breaks down the flaws of all the stereotypical pieces of advice we regularly receive while suggesting good pieces of advice that are useful and applicable for us. Selective bias is the reason for a lot of bullshit. This occurs when a survey or a statistic is unintentionally biased in the sampling population. The author describes the situation for waiting for a bus at the airport, for your particular brand of rental car. It always seems like all of the other busses pass you by, before your bus arrives. This is not a coincidence; it is a statistical rule when busses tend to get clumped together instead of arriving equally spaced in time. The author also explains why people who are dating seem to meet nice people who are unattractive, or attractive jerks. This also is not a coincidence; the book describes why this happens!

Similarly, the things that I've seen that are promising for fighting global warming denial involve taking people out into nature or doing experiments and hands-on demonstrations of the evidence. But I can't imagine a scalable approach for doing that with tens of millions of people. And that would not stop the endless flow of money and beautifully-crafted lies from powerful special interests. 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.”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. But Trump was right in that Obama’s FBI was spying on his campaign. As he has been proven on many issues: Russia probe, Wuhan lab virus (always was a near certainty), Hunter Biden, etc. I guess this is Sagan's Demon-Haunted World for 2021? Both authors go through the most common ways that data is used to bullshit people and to create narratives. It grew out of a university course (Calling Bullshit) and goes over ways data is misrepresented, chosen, how sometimes counter-intuitively data can be interpreted, how people trying to sell you stuff or ideas can manipulate data to tell the story they want to tell, Ally MacLeod never promised that Scotland would win the World Cup in 1978. But he did think they would be good enough to make the third-place playoff.

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. 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).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?) 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. 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. 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.