CALLING BULLSHIT

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.