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. Wittgenstein’s response seems not just odd, but rude. So why did the great philosopher do this? Frankfurt’s answer is that throughout his life ‘Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combatting what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “non-sense”.’ Wittgenstein is ‘disgusted’ by Pascal’s remark because ‘it is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality’. She is ‘not even concerned whether her statement is correct’. If we were to react like Wittgenstein whenever we were faced with bullshit, our lives would probably become very difficult indeed. 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. 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).

Four errors in this section, in my humble opinion, after investigation. Quite a lot for just part of one sentence! 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 (who teach a course based on this material) observe that one significant issue with science is the specialized language and insider techniques that make it impenetrable to the outsider, something that doesn’t apply so much in other fields such as advertising or politics. And precisely because of that barrier, “science-y” language has been co-opted by other disciplines intent on bullshitting. 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 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.

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Stanislaw Burzynski in 1997 at the federal courthouse in Houston, Texas, where he faced 34 charges of mail fraud, which were dismissed, and 41 of violating FDA regulations, upon which the jury failed to reach a verdict. Photograph: Pat Sullivan/AP 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 no doubt you remember that the smoking-lung cancer link was established on the basis of such correlational evidence, as was the whole health-movement deriving from the entirely correlational Framingham Study. This study resulted in a 50% reduction in heart disease over 50 years because people learned – via correlational data – that exercise, diet and blood-pressure control made them healthy and stopped them dying. One of my favourite bits of this book – and it is clearly among the authors’ favourite bits too, since they repeat it so often – is the idea that ‘if it seems too good or too bad to be true, it probably is’. This is a strikingly useful test – but one that is insanely difficult to use. This is because it has to overcome the ‘I bloody well knew it’ response. And speaking for myself, a team of wild horses is often not enough to drag me away from a factoid that confirms what I’ve always known to be true. You might think you are holier than me on this – I just have to say that from my own experience on social media, I am going to need some pretty strong proof from you on that. A very useful little book that provides techniques for detecting and calling out both bullshit and lies, with a particular focus on quantitative science. So after surfing the web to find a blank template for the well known Dummies novels....I thought it was both humorous and appropriate.

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Who amongst us is without sin? And I’m not just asking for a friend. We’ve all shared something on the internet that we regret. Especially when we realise with a rush of all-too-rare self-awareness, that the reason we posted it was because it appealed more to our prejudices than to our reason. This is inevitable. And this is also one of the things the authors repeatedly warn us we need to worry about. They quote Neil Postman saying that the person most likely to fool you is yourself. Confirmation bias is our number one, very favourite flavour of bias. So, finding ways to trip ourselves up before we start accepting as true the latest factoid that proves that all those bastards from the other side are selfish, nasty hypocrites is essential. We need to take time to pause. Although, that is easier said than done, obviously. But I’ve said it now, so, all good.