Calling Bullshit
Ratings9
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings9
Average rating4.3
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.
Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don’t feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data.
You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.
We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.
Reviews with the most likes.
This book was a mixed bag of sorts. On the one hand, the authors recognise that bullshit is high art, spread through fake news factories and hammering away at our critical facilities through volume and confirmation bias alone.
On the other hand, Calling Bullshit treats itself as high art. It contains gems such as “you must treat others with kindness because the power you've gained is tremendous, and there's no need to be too high and mighty”. I could also express the book in pamphlet form for what it's worth - without losing an iota of coherency - in its current state, it simply felt bloated.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the author's treatment of the topic - to give out one line of a rebuttal, he prefers pages of exposition. Given the book's title, it's ironic that I could make a strong case against the book itself as to how bullshit cloaks itself in a veneer of volume and intellect. Studies showing ‘females could run faster than males in 2156' are refuted as bullshit because ‘by this logic, 100-meter races could be run in negative time by 2536', and the core argument that females might run faster than males in the future is never addressed by the authors.
I could even argue that the book's climax, in which the authors show how ‘well, actually...' person is different from the ‘bullshit denier', is simply what the authors do all along. Well-intentioned claims that the wage pay gap exists because recommendations for women mention their communication abilities more than their intelligence are downplayed in the book just because some tweets misquoted the original study. Examples like these make for extremely frustrating reading.
This book feels like an introductory primer for tackling misinformation, which is okay for most, I guess, but not for me.
The most well-written book on skepticism and critical thinking I have read thus far.
