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

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I now find myself feeling so deeply that I am unable to articulate the pain I feel. So instead of me putting what I have learned or experienced into a poorly written novel...I told myself that there isn't a book on how to deal with your bullshit.... 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.

It was good to see mention of mathiness, which Paul Romer has used in the context of much economic analysis (see e.g. Piketty's flawed analyses) but which here the authors use in the context of many popular business books, which often invent nonsensical formulas, such as the well-known Trust Equation (according to which, if self-orientation is zero, trust is infinite, and which adds quantities which can't easily be measured on a common scale). 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. 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. 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! 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?

Tom, you clearly think confidence is a cod and this strongly-held opinion trumps a fair-minded scrutiny of the scientific literature. 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. Why did it get the next one wrong? Is it because it wasn’t confident enough? No: it has correctly assessed that it will get it right 49 times out of 50. If the AI had said it was 99% confident, it would have been overconfident. The AI has learnt, from its experience of its own capabilities and the difficulty of the dog-cat-recognition task, that it gets it right 98% of the time.

By far my favorite chapter in this book was the one on selection bias; it's easy to think about selection bias when you're reading an econ paper or a clinical trial and the cohort selection is explicit, but the authors show that variants of selection bias are at the root of many other pervasive statistical curiosities (e.g., the observation that the majority of people have fewer friends than their friends do). 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.I started this book while waiting for Abbu outside the ICU. The book ends today. So, today again I went to the hospital in front of the ICU. Then there is the misleading biases in data visualization. After the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law was enacted, a figure seemed to show at first glance, a drop in homicides. A close look at the vertical axis shows that it was inverted, giving the wrong impression. It turns out that the author of the figure did not intend to mislead, but used an unfortunate representation of the truth. 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.