A statistically challenging master class in the art of bullshit detection.
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.”
Beginning with a provocative opening line—“The world is awash with bullshit, and we’re drowning in it”—Bergstrom and West deliver a sturdy guide to helping readers avoid a lifetime of being bamboozled by misinformation. As they note, much of what seems factual and statistically sound is often nothing but bullshit. The authors differentiate between what they refer to as “old school bullshit,” which is mostly rhetorical and language-based, and “new school bullshit,” which refers to the cagey manipulation of mathematics and scientific data to create the illusion of sophistication and factual accuracy. The authors focus mostly on the latter, methodically examining the many characters well-versed in the art of bullshitting, whether they are scientific or medical researchers, advertisers, or other professional manipulators desperate to pull the wool over the public’s eyes in pursuit of profit and power. Bergstrom and West direct our attention to the technocrats and social media giants who facilitate mass disinformation and preside over machine-learning algorithms that are often faulty. The authors occasionally go too heavy on the statistical analysis, which can get long-winded and make readers pine for the more attitude-driven polemical salvos aimed at bullshitters earlier in the book. Nonetheless, the authors make plenty of crucial and original points, especially in outing the current trend toward conflating association with causality, not to mention exposing how numbers and percentages are routinely manipulated in order to turn us all into mindless consumers. However abstruse they might get on any given page, Bergstrom and West give you the tools needed to make yourself bullshit-proof—a skill that will prove to be ever more important as big data continues to proliferate.
A statistically challenging master class in the art of bullshit detection.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-50918-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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