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. My cynical fellow participant in the mandala-colouring workshop described it as ‘bullshit’. She had chosen her words wisely. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt at Princeton University defined bullshit as talk that has no relationship to the truth. Lying covers up the truth, while bullshit is empty, and bears no relationship to the truth. Most of this book is stuff that I (and probably many readers) am familiar with intellectually but don't necessarily apply reflexively whenever I read the news or hear a statistic. So for me, this book was really useful in that it primed me to intentionally be on the defensive about common misrepresentations in statistics and data visualization. In Bad Advice, relationship expert Dr. Venus Nicolino—a.k.a. Dr. V—takes a blowtorch to the shrink-wrapped, “feel good” BS that passes for self-help these days. Instead of following Wittgenstein’s example, there are ways we can politely call bullshit. The first step is to calmly ask what the evidence says. This is likely to temper our interlocutors’ views, even if the results are inconclusive. The second step is to ask about how their idea would work. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale University found that when they asked subjects to tell them, on a scale of 1 to 7, how they would rate their knowledge about everyday objects such as toilets, most people would say about 4 or 5. But when asked to describe precisely how a toilet worked, they dropped the rating of their own toilet expertise to below 3. Asking over-confident bullshitters exactly how their idea might work is another way to slow them down. Finally, ask the bullshitter to clarify what he means. Often, bullshit artists rely on ‘zombie nouns’ such as ‘globalisation’, ‘facilitation’ and ‘optimisation’. Pushing beyond linguistic boondoggles helps everyone to see what is solid and what is clothed in ornamental talk.

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.Recently I was at a kind of launch event for a new data science unit. At the end of the teaching demo, a government representative stood up and said that a good 95% of data science graduates are not good for their purpose, they can run algorithms and analyse data but they have zero critical thinking skills, and sometimes present results that are obviously nonsense if you stop and think about it. West/Bergstrom identify this too: If Unherd starts having a golf column, I do not think employing Tom as the golf correspondent would be advisable. I do not follow golf closely these days, but I did know enough to think it unlikely that events had proceeded as above. And you airily sweep away entire careers of careful scientists researching apparently ‘soft’ subjects with careless, inaccurate words like ‘debunked’. 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).

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. 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." 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?)

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. Two scientists write this book. Their commentary on science is welcome. But they are attempting to understand social media, historical transformations, the changes to education, and - indeed - affirm the value of media literacy training.

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 livesBooster 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. If there's one problem with this book is that the actual 'calling bullshit' part is very short, some tools are presented and some caveats described (i.e., don't be the 'well actually' guy, only call out bullshit if there's an actual problem, not to try and make yourself look smart). I guess you could write an entirely different book on tools and techniques on the discussion and public dismantling of bullshit. 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. And so with the arrival and US federal mismanagement of the pandemic, and the associated disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories, it turns out the release of Calling Bullshit is more timely than the authors imagined when they began their project years ago.