Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom (PDF)

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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. “A modern classic . . . a straight-talking survival guide to the mean streets of a dying democracy and a global pandemic.”—WiredMisinformation, 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A modern classic . . . Bergstrom and West leave the reader feeling a very particular kind of smarter: the empowered kind. . . . A straight-talking survival guide to the mean streets of a dying democracy and a global pandemic.”—Wired“A passionate exposition of how the language of science can be weaponized to mislead both researchers and the public . . . landing just when it has never been more important to know how to navigate data.”—Nature“The information landscape is strewn with quantitative cowflop; read this book if you want to know where not to step.”—Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to be Wrong“If I could make this critical handbook’s contents required curriculum for every high school student (thus replacing trigonometry), then I would do so. I highly recommend Calling Bullshit for our modern existence in the age of misinformation, and regret only that I didn’t think of the title for my own book.”—Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction“I laughed, I cried—to read Bergstrom and West’s great examples of ‘bullshit.’ This is a gripping read for anybody who cares about how we are fooled (and how not to be), and the connection to numeracy and science. But it’s also just great fun. This is a necessary book for our times.”—Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate and professor of physics, University of California at Berkeley “If you want to read what will surely be a classic, buy Calling Bullshit. It addresses the most important issue of our time: the decline in respect for Truth. It is also a literary masterpiece. Every page—indeed, every paragraph—is a new bit of fun.” —George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in economics“Each of us now swims through deception so pervasive that we no longer realize it’s there. Calling Bullshit presents a master class in how to spot it, how to resist it, and how to keep it from succeeding.”—Paul Romer, 2018 Nobel Laureate in economics“Part playful polemic and part serious scientific treatise on a plague that ‘pollutes our world by misleading people about specific issues and . . . undermines our ability to trust information in general’ . . . a statistically challenging master class in the art of bullshit detection.”—Kirkus Reviews About the Author Carl T. Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, where he studies how epidemics spread through populations and how information flows through biological and social systems at scales—from the intracellular control of gene expression to the spread of misinformation on social media.Jevin D. West is an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He is the director of UW’s Center for an Informed Public and co-director of its DataLab, where he studies the science of science and the impact of technology on society. He also coordinates data science education at UW’s eScience Institute. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1Bullshit EverywhereThis is a book about bullshit. It is a book about how we are inundated with it, about how we can learn to see through it, and about how we can fight back. First things first, though. We would like to understand what bullshit is, where it comes from, and why so much of it is produced. To answer these questions, it is helpful to look back into deep time at the origins of the phenomenon.Bullshit is not a modern invention. In one of his Socratic dialogues, Euthydemus, Plato complains that the philosophers known as the Sophists are indifferent to what is actually true and are interested only in winning arguments. In other words, they are bullshit artists. But if we want to trace bullshit back to its origins, we have to look a lot further back than any human civilization. Bullshit has its origins in deception more broadly, and animals have been deceiving one another for hundreds of millions of years.Cheating crustaceans and devious ravensThe oceans are full of fierce and wonderful creatures, but few are as badass as the marine crustaceans known as the mantis shrimp or, in more technical circles, stomatopods. Some specialize in eating marine snails, which are protected by hard, thick shells. To smash through these calcite defenses, mantis shrimp have evolved a spring-loading mechanism in their forelimbs that allows them to punch with enormous force. Their hammer-like claws travel 50 mph when they strike. The punch is so powerful that it creates an underwater phenomenon known as cavitation bubbles, a sort of literal Batman “KAPOW!” that results in a loud noise and a flash of light. In captivity they sometimes punch right through the glass walls of their aquariums.This punching power serves another purpose. Mantis shrimp live on shallow reefs, where they are vulnerable to moray eels, octopi, sharks, and other predators. To stay safe, they spend much of their time holed up in cavities in the reef, with just their powerful foreclaws exposed. But suitable cavities are in short supply, and this can lead to fights. When an intruder approaches a smaller resident, the resident typically flees. But if the resident is big enough, it waves its claws in a fierce display, demonstrating its size and challenging its opponent.Like any superhero, however, mantis shrimp have an Achilles’ heel. They have to molt in order to replace the hard casings of their hammer claws—which as you can imagine take more than their share of abuse. During the two or three days that the animal is molting, it is extremely vulnerable. It can’t punch, and it lacks the hard shell that normally defends it against predators. Pretty much everything on the reef eats everything else, and mantis shrimp are essentially lobster tails with claws on the front.So if you’re a molting mantis shrimp holed up in a discreet crevice, the last thing you want to do is flee and expose yourself to the surrounding dangers. This is where the deception comes in. Normally, big mantis shrimp wave their claws—an honest threat—and small mantis shrimp flee. But during molting, mantis shrimp of any size perform the threat display, even though in their current state they can’t punch any harder than an angry gummy bear. The threat is completely empty—but the danger of leaving one’s hole is even greater than the risk of getting into a fight. Intruders, aware that they’re facing the mantis shrimp’s fierce punch, are reluctant to call the bluff.Stomatopods may be good bluffers, and bluffing does feel rather like a kind of bullshit—but it’s not very sophisticated bullshit. For one thing, this behavior isn’t something that these creatures think up and decide to carry out. It is merely an evolved response, a sort of instinct or reflex.A sophisticated bullshitter needs a theory of mind—she needs to be able to put herself in the place of her mark. She needs to be able to think about what the others around her do and do not know. She needs to be able to imagine what impression will be created by what sort of bullshit, and to choose her bullshit accordingly.Such advanced cognition is rare in the animal kingdom. We have it. Our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, may have it as well. Other apes and monkeys do not seem to have this capacity. But one very different family does: Corvidae.We know that corvids—ravens, crows, and jays—are remarkably intelligent birds. They manufacture the most sophisticated tools of any nonhuman species. They manipulate objects in their environment to solve all manners of puzzle. The Aesop’s fable about the crow putting pebbles into an urn to raise the water level is probably based on a real observation; captive crows can figure out how to do this sort of thing. Ravens plan ahead for the future, selecting objects that may be useful to them later. Crows recognize human faces and hold grudges against those who have threatened or mistreated them. They even pass these grudges along to their fellow crows.We don’t know exactly why corvids are so smart, but their lifestyle does reward intelligence. They live a long time, they are highly social, and they creatively explore their surroundings for anything that might be edible. Ravens in particular may have evolved alongside pack-hunting species such as wolves and ourselves, and are excellent at tricking mammals out of their food.Because food is sometimes plentiful and other times scarce, most corvid species cache their food, storing it in a safe place where it can be recovered later. But caching is a losing proposition if others are watching. If one bird sees another cache a piece of food, the observer often steals it. As a result, corvids are cautious about caching their food in view of other birds. When being watched, ravens cache quickly, or move out of sight before hiding their food. They also “fake-cache,” pretending to stash a food item but actually keeping it safely in their beak or crop to be properly cached at a later time.So when a raven pretends to cache a snack but is actually just faking, does that qualify as bullshitting? In our view, this depends on why the raven is faking and whether it thinks about the impression its fakery will create in the mind of an onlooker. Full-on bullshit is intended to distract, confuse, or mislead—which means that the bullshitter needs to have a mental model of the effect that his actions have on an observer’s mind. Do corvids have a theory of mind? Do they understand that other birds can see them caching and are likely to steal from them? Or do they merely follow some simple rule of thumb—such as “cache only when no other ravens are around”—without knowing why they are doing so? Researchers who study animal behavior have been hard-pressed to demonstrate that any nonhuman animals have a theory of mind. But recent studies suggest that ravens may be an exception. When caching treats, they do think about what other ravens know. And not only do ravens act to deceive other birds sitting right there in front of them; they recognize that there might be other birds out there, unseen, who can be deceived as well. That is pretty close to what we do when we bullshit on the Internet. We don’t see anyone out there, but we hope and expect that our words will reach an audience.Ravens are tricky creatures, but we humans take bullshit to the next level. Like ravens, we have a theory of mind. We can think in advance about how others will interpret our actions, and we use this skill to our advantage. Unlike ravens, we also have a rich system of language to deploy. Human language is immensely expressive, in the sense that we can combine words in a vast number of ways to convey different ideas. Together, language and theory of mind allow us to convey a broad range of messages and to model in our own minds what effects our messages will have on those who hear them. This is a good skill to have when trying to communicate efficiently—and it’s equally useful when using communication to manipulate another person’s beliefs or actions.That’s the thing about communication. It’s a two-edged sword. By communicating we can work together in remarkable ways. But by paying attention to communication, you are giving other people a “handle” they can use to manipulate your behavior. Animals with limited communication systems—a few different alarm calls, say—have just a few handles with which they can be manipulated. Capuchin monkeys warn one another with alarm calls. On average this saves a lot of capuchin lives. But it also allows lower-ranking monkeys to scare dominant individuals away from precious food: All they have to do is send a deceptive alarm call in the absence of danger. Still, there aren’t all that many things capuchins can say, so there aren’t all that many ways they can deceive one another. A capuchin monkey can tell me to flee, even if doing so is not in my best interest. But it can’t, say, convince me that it totally has a girlfriend in Canada; I’ve just never met her. Never mind getting me to transfer $10,000 into a bank account belonging to the widow of a mining tycoon, who just happened to ask out of the blue for my help laundering her fortune into US currency.So why is there bullshit everywhere? Part of the answer is that everyone, crustacean or raven or fellow human being, is trying to sell you something. Another part is that humans possess the cognitive tools to figure out what kinds of bullshit will be effective. A third part is that our complex language allows us to produce an infinite variety of bullshit. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Brandolini’s law, which states that “the amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it,” explains why there is so much BS in the world. As Uriel Fanelli put it, “an idiot can create more BS than you could ever hope to refute.”So creating BS is easy; refuting it is hard. And it is precisely this asymmetry that explains why BS persists and how it can even grow over time.So how can one hope to rid the world of increasing levels of BS? Since it’s easier to create BS than to refute it, simply refuting each new instance of BS seems like a losing battle. The better strategy is educational; if you can inoculate enough people against falling for BS in the first place, BS never gains enough traction to require costly efforts at refutation.This, in essence, is the goal of the book. The authors want to immunize you against BS, with a focus on the quantitative variety. While it’s relatively easy to identify old-school BS based on flowery language and empty rhetoric, new-school BS is more insidious and sophisticated with its use of statistics, charts, graphs, and scientific-sounding claims. This is the BS that is more persuasive, harder to refute, and ultimately more dangerous.The authors first note that while arguments based on statistical and scientific reasoning can appear intimidating, there are basic fallacies that one can look out for that do not require any advanced mathematical ability. It is rarely necessary to look into the “black box”—the authors’ term for complex equations, algorithms, or scientific processes—when the problem with BS is often the data that feeds into the black box. Recognizing that the data is biased or unrepresentative of the larger population, for example, is an easy method of spotting BS that does not require any skills in higher mathematics.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.One of my favorite chapters, chapter 8, has the authors calling BS on arguments that claim that artificial intelligence will take over the world. This has always been BS and likely always will be, as the authors demonstrate the limits of how machines are designed to “think.”The book ends with a couple summary chapters on how to spot and refute BS, and also on the difference between calling legitimate BS 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 BS 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.Overall, I suppose that if the reader has a lot of experience with informal logic and spotting fallacies—particularly of a quantitative nature—then this book might not offer anything particularly new. Although even then the book is filled with interesting, updated examples and a ton of polemical humor which makes the book a fun read. If, on the other hand, the reader has limited experience with these concepts, this book is a must read as it shows how quantitative BS can be spotted and refuted with even the most limited of mathematical ability.

⭐The book reminds me a lot of the 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics, which jokingly referred to itself as a “manual for swindlers.” Like that brief book, this one has a light touch, clever writing, and fun examples as it alerts us to what goes wrong if people are naïve or dishonest in how they collect, analyze, and present data.The book covers what one would expect in a guide of this type—confirmation bias, selection bias, meaningless, statistics, and common cause and other fallacies of correlation and causation. This is all standard stuff.The book gains usefulness for contemporary readers when it shows how the online world, modern graphics, Big Data, AI, and modern academic publishing are contributing to the problem of knowing what is true. The chapter on visual displays of data is particularly fun. (I have never felt comfortable reading a 3D chart or table and now I know why).Another topical chapter covers the growing concerns about replication and reproducibility. Are we publishing too many studies with false positives? Are we ignoring many that are true but do not reveal anything groundbreaking? Which ones can we trust? The authors, while defending scientific endeavor, offer some tips for spotting error and ridiculousness.The final chapter is important because it warns us to be humble and not be jerks when we point out BS. Perhaps this should have been the first chapter in case readers neglect to finish the book. I taught a critical thinking course for several decades at the university level and worried that the tools of critical thinking were too easily weaponized and might become a cudgel that a brute could yield to bully others or a means to show off. This chapter addresses that tendency.Given the book’s strong effort to tie statistical error and deception to current trends, I am disappointed it did not cover “multiplier effects.” Politicians and activists love to imagine those. “Every dollar spent on this project will pay back $2.63 in benefits.” Similarly, it barely touched on the dangers of extrapolation (“if this trend continues”) and only as a tool for debunking. Bubbles, crashes, riots, and calls for draconian policies can be triggered by thinking too far ahead of the data. The book also does not address another current fear— that researchers on college campuses avoid topics or suppress results if they might cause offense to gun-shy undergrads or the politically correct.One drawback of the book is its occasional descent from casualness to breeziness. For example, it rather flippantly lumps climate skeptics in with people who believe in the healing power of crystals or creationism. That is dismissive and unfair given that politicians are floating proposals to address climate change that will cost many trillions of dollars. Many climate skeptics accept the evidence that the earth’s temperature rose due to human action but are not convinced that it is catastrophic or that spending trillions can do much to stop or reverse it. The authors criticize Steven Hayward’s line graph for making warming seem trivial by having the y-axis run from -10 to 110 degrees, but I sensed that his chart was satirical. It pokes fun at graphs that mark temperature increases in 5ths of a degree. Hayward’s y-axis covers the full range of temperatures most humans are likely to experience and shows that the average temperature is not pushing us anywhere near those extremes.The book could use an index.

⭐This book instantly became my soul sister. If these guys have a fan club…I’d like to nominate myself as President. I loved this book so much.I work as a plain language expert and have said the phrase “I’m gonna call bullshit on that,” more times than I can begin to count. So much so, that I actually stumbled upon this book by chance—while I was looking on the internet for some type of poster or picture to hang in my office— that expressed this exact sentiment.I downloaded the audio book and loved it so much I bought a hard copy of it for both myself and my boss.I think this book should be required reading for every high school student before they head out into the world. It’s hilariously funny and written in plain language so hard concepts are easy to understand.My job is to make sure people understand what they read and can use that information to make informed decisions. But I don’t deal with research or data every day. I found that as I was editing other people’s work, it was sometimes hard to explain WHY things didn’t make sense—I just knew they didn’t. Reading this book actually improved my own skillset and made me better able to articulate exactly why research or data didn’t seem to make sense. I’ve actually used it several times as a reference.After working on the front lines of a pandemic, I think EVERYONE should read this book…and would highly recommend it to anyone. I thought it was funny and brilliant. I felt like these guys wrote it just to validate the things I say at work .This is now on my list of favorite books of all time—which is not an easy list to make—so that says something.

⭐In the first three chapters, the authors lay out their motivations for writing the book and set some foundations. Where does bullshit come from? Why is it so difficult to get rid of it? What’s the role of internet and social media in the spread of misinformation? The proposed narrative is quite compelling. Even if you don’t fully agree that social media had a negative impact on how we perceive the world, it is difficult not to see the need for education on how to process the sheer amount of information we are exposed to.The middle part explores the main fallacies that can arise when using data to support an argument. The difficult relationship between correlation and causation, selection bias, data visualisation and overfitting are the main themes explored here. As well as giving a great explanation of the basic ideas, the authors manage to explain quite technical concepts, such as Berkson’s Paradox and the observation selection effect, in an easy and comprehensible way.Chapter 9 stands out as an outlier, exploring one of the authors academic interests, the “Science of science”. How does science works, what are its problems? Why do scientists spend their time catfighting on Twitter and why, nevertheless, science works?The final part is a summary of the presented ideas, and proposes a strategy on how to spot and refute BS, without becoming a “well, actually” guy.While someone with training in quantitative research might not learn much from this book, it is a great resource for the rest to deal with a data-driven, information-flooded world. I always thought that studying statistics and probability would equip people with exceptional instruments to process information. It turns out that this book gets you a long way there (even if not completely there, obviously), without a single equation. Also, it’s great fun.

⭐Even when you are a researcher it is always helpful to cover these topics in order to tune your own critical thinking. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and finished it in a day! The chapter about publication bias is really quite worrying and is serious motivation for good evidence based practice and strong statistical knowledge. A must read for students as the topics are explained so well.

⭐Creases on pages and front cover and holes on the back cover

⭐Ordered e-book version. Really good book … Recommended for everyone who wants to traverse through the data overload of current times.

⭐Pour avoir suivi leur cours, je souhaitais aveuglement me procurer l’ouvrage. Je le possede déjà en version dématérialisé, en epub. Je l’attendais avec impatience, sans grandes exigences, mais je fini quand même déçu.Si le contenu semble au RDV, la couverture elle est de très très très piètre qualité… Doublé d’un vendeur qui ne prends pas soin de l’ouvrage, on recoit ça dans un état lamentable ! Vraiment inadmissible quand on les voit vendre ça au delà de sa vrai valeur (cet ouvrage est à 20 livres à la base, c’est écrit dessus). Je ne suis pas très regardant sur les détails, mais là cette couverture est clairement abusive: on dirait une page blanche imprimée à la maison, qui n’est même pas adaptée aux dimensions du livre… Les pages sont elles aussi de mauvaise facture. Les figures de l’ouvrage sont en noir et blanc, on comprends mieux ce choix en voyant les pages. L’éditeur a clairement une intention d’économie, de même pour le vendeur. J’ai payé l’ouvrage 10 euros au dessus de sa vrai valeur, et je le regrette amèrement. Pourtant je ne demandais pas grand chose d’autre que la version papier d’un cours que j’ai suivit et d’un epub que je possede. J’attendais cet ouvrage avec impatience… Dommage pour les auteurs, ils n’ont pas su choisir l’éditeur et les revendeurs. Suivez leur cours, au pire lisez ça en format epub (même si, comme moi vous aimez le papier), ca donne plus envie que la forme sous laquelle ça semble avoir été publié !

⭐Not found.

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