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Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

Carl T. Bergstrom,

Jevin West

4.15 · Rating details · 2,842 ratings · 397 reviews

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.

It's increasingly difficult to know what's true. Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture eleva ...more

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published August 4th 2020 by Random House

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Nov 19, 2020 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, maths, social-theory

I think you need to read this book. It’s not urgent, anytime over the next couple of weeks will do fine. I was thinking while I was reading this of Bad Science (which you should also read, not least since the jokes are much better), but the advantage of this book is that it is written by people who are (how do I put this in a way so as not to hurt their feelings?) relatively dull. Dull, it’s true, but systematic (or do I repeat myself?) And so, they present the seemingly endless ways we can have I think you need to read this book. It’s not urgent, anytime over the next couple of weeks will do fine. I was thinking while I was reading this of Bad Science (which you should also read, not least since the jokes are much better), but the advantage of this book is that it is written by people who are (how do I put this in a way so as not to hurt their feelings?) relatively dull. Dull, it’s true, but systematic (or do I repeat myself?) And so, they present the seemingly endless ways we can have bullshit served up to us in ways that feel very comprehensive. And then they go about teaching us all the ways we can train ourselves to notice. (You know, “Hang on – this smells like bullshit…”)

I want to start by assuring you this isn’t the book I thought it was going to be. When I started reading it, I was expecting it to suddenly become something a little like: “One of the major problems people face in statistical analysis is in confusing the simple binomial with the chi-square test” (at this point I was expecting the book to then take a quick digression of three or so pages of impenetrable differential equations). Then I was expecting the authors to say “As you can see, and this as should be obvious to even the most boneheaded layperson, you simply can’t perform a t-test on a non-normally distributed key variable integrated Howard’s Disappointment ratio, not unless the effect size is under 0.4 and the products of the remainders have been divided by log e….”

I was so afraid that this book would turn into one of those books that I literally flicked through the pages before buying it with an expression on my face as if, at any moment, one of those pages would set off the mathematical equivalent of a landmine.

This never happened. In fact, the book expects you to know nothing of statistics at all. Better still, it leaves you with almost as much knowledge of statistics as you started with. If you are after a ‘how to statistics while winning friends and influencing people’ book, this isn’t it. Rather, this book explains that the black boxes of statistical analysis can remain mostly obscure to you, and even so, you can still spot bullshit. Spotting bullshit is described as much more of an attitude of mind, than the clever application of an obscure statistical method. It has as much to do with checking sources and thinking through the implications of what you’ve been told, than it does in finding ways to spot the right statistical analysis to run on the data. And this is a lucky thing. Not just because you might not choose the right statistical function, but rather because you probably are never going to be given the actual data anyway, just the conclusion. And as they say repeatedly throughout, there’s more than enough bullshit out there for all of us. And they’re not just talking of the over-the-top, QAnon (hey, I just ordered for a small Margaretta and now Hillary Clinton has turned up with a 7-year-old in lingerie) type bullshit. There’s lots of bullshit that sounds and looks and feels completely reasonable. And the authors here give you tools and loads of examples to spot just that.

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.

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.

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?

Or take all of the recent excitement about the discovery of water on the moon. Or when so many very old celebrities die. Like when I found out Vera Lynn had died. My first reaction wasn’t “oh god, that’s terrible – we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…” it was rather, “But, didn’t she die years ago? She must have, the journalist has just got the names stuffed up. It’s probably Doris Day who has died.” And this is all part of the reason why we are so easily fooled – the truth is that Lynn or Day, it hardly matters at all to our real lives.

If I told you that in the Andes, they’d discovered a new species of humanoid that lived only 30,000 years ago, would you be certain that was bullshit? Or what if I told you that Honeywell are working on trapped ions because they think they are likely to prove to be more effective qubits than superconducting loops? The problem is with how the media has trained us throughout our lives. It makes our swallowing bullshit virtually inevitable. Look, I’d even read The God Particle, but not even I suspected the whole world would get quite so excited when the Higgs Boson was discovered. And this is because we live in a world where people are more interested in facts than narratives, in whats over whys. Even things that are definitely ‘true’ become bullshit when we have no context with which to understand them in. I mean, if you can’t tell me what the Higgs Boson does while it is grazing in the particle zoo, maybe your knowing it ‘exists’ doesn’t really matter.

But I digress. Look, trust me, you want to read this book. It will help you find love, your children will suddenly start to look up to you, your wife will overlook your all too numerous infidelities and you’ll win the lottery. ...more

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Aug 12, 2020 Ryan Boissonneault rated it it was amazing

Brandolini’s law, which states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it,” explains why there is so much bullshit in the world. As Uriel Fanelli put it, “an idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute.”

So creating bullshit is easy; refuting it is hard. And it is precisely this asymmetry that explains why bullshit persists and how it can even grow over time.

So how can one hope to rid the world of incr Brandolini’s law, which states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it,” explains why there is so much bullshit in the world. As Uriel Fanelli put it, “an idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute.”

So creating bullshit is easy; refuting it is hard. And it is precisely this asymmetry that explains why bullshit persists and how it can even grow over time.

So how can one hope to rid the world of increasing levels of bullshit? Since it’s easier to create bullshit than to refute it, simply refuting each new instance of bullshit seems like a losing battle. The better strategy is educational; if you can inoculate enough people against falling for bullshit in the first place, bullshit 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 bullshit, with a focus on the quantitative variety. While it’s relatively easy to identify old-school bullshit based on flowery language and empty rhetoric, new-school bullshit is more insidious and sophisticated with its use of statistics, charts, graphs, and scientific-sounding claims. This is the bullshit 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 bullshit 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 bullshit 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 bullshit on arguments that claim that artificial intelligence will take over the world. This has always been bullshit 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 bullshit, and also on the difference between calling legitimate bullshit 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 bullshit 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 bullshit can be spotted and refuted with even the most limited of mathematical ability.
...more

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Jul 05, 2021 K.J. Charles added it

Shelves: cough-bullshit-cough, non-fiction

Excellent read on bullshit, and specifically the modern kind that hides behind statistics or plausible-sounding claims. Full of useful examples, ways of tackling it (including 'get off the internet'), and memorable quotes. Very definitely a book that should be issued to everyone, although what it doesn't tackle is the people who are absolutely determined to believe bullshit because it suits them better than the truth. I don't know what you do about them.

Read this as a refresher against the tsun ...more

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Dec 27, 2020 Mehrsa rated it really liked it

This is a very readable and interesting, but not particularly new or revelatory book about fake news, bullshit stats, and things like p-hacking and click-baiting articles. I've read books that are better at deepdives into this stuff, but this was a good intro to how to call BS. I found particularly fascinating the sections about deceptive graphs and stats because that stuff can be tricky. However, it does feel like bullshit is the least of our problems these days. given how people just believe o ...more

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Aug 06, 2020 Tara Brabazon rated it liked it

I had high hopes for this book. It is OK. It makes some strong points about quantification and the visualization of data sets. But in so many ways, it performs the problems it critiques, but in the inverse.

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.

Intriguingly, the entire literature on information litera ...more

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Dec 03, 2020 Wick Welker rated it it was amazing

Shelves: epistemology, nonfiction, nonfiction-favorites

Falsehoods fly and truth comes limping after it.

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.

First principle: science is messy. As a medical doctor myself, I know that it is INCREDIBLY difficult to prove Falsehoods fly and truth comes limping after it.

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.

First principle: science is messy. As a medical doctor myself, I know that it is INCREDIBLY difficult to prove that something is true (a drug, a therapy, mortality rates ect.) It can take decades of many randomized control trials to even create a landmark study that can change medical practice. With this in mind, how could one obscure research paper, whose hypothesis has been taken whole cloth and tacked into the twitterverse possible have any bearing on scientific thought or be a representation of reality? From my own experience almost all headlines that have to do with medicine, including the coronavirus, are complete and utter bullshit. As an ICU doc myself, I could go on and on and on about the misinformation of COVID-19. But I digress.

Calling Bullshit will outline to you the myriad of ways in which you are bullshitted. You'll learn about the Wakefield debacle connecting autism to MMR vaccine in 1998 which was based on a tiny cohort and has been completely disproved. But its influence is everlasting. The Brandolini principle is true: it's hard to disprove all the bullshit that is produced. It is much easier to blast the waves with bullshit than it is to unpack the nonsense and disprove it. Bullshit is easy to produce and easy to spread.

Technology has made the bullshit problem much worse. Forget the all-seeing eye of AI and tech, if you start out with garbage training programs for the algorithm, you will get garbage out. Is it any wonder that a paper claiming to recognize criminality from a picture would produce nothing but utter bullshit if the input data was headshots of non-criminals and MUGSHOTS of convicted criminals?

The low cost of production and publication has contributed to bullshit. There is more volume and less filtering. Advertising revenue is designed to make you click, regardless of content. "This this will 'make you cry' or 'make you angry'" ect are THE most clickable headlines. They convey emotion, not fact. News has changed from what is happening to how we are FEELING. There are those that will conflate probabilistic causality with sufficient or necessary causality stating that smoking doesn't kill you because there are smokers who don't die of lung cancer (thx Mike Pence). Bullshit also constantly conflates correlation with causality--YOU SEE THIS EVERYWHERE. But correlation doesn't sell newspapers, causation does, so this is why you see headlines proscribing that "wine is good for the heart". It's all bullshit.

Does a pitcher of beer cause more beer drinking? Or is that people who are serious about drinking beer order a pitcher? Does delayed gratification cause success (famous marshmallow trial) or does having rich parents correlate with a child being able to withstand not eating a marshmallow when it's in front of their face? Claiming the average over the median is also an enormous source of bullshit, like how claiming a tax plan will reduce "average" American taxes (when it increases median taxes and benefits the wealthy). There is meaningless numerosity: "this beverage is 99% free of caffeine" HMMM, SO IS COFFEE. Commercial branding that has an air of "mathiness" somehow commands authority over their consumers. Data visualization is a huge source of bullshit. Creating "ducks" where the data doesn't fit the graph or "glass slippers" where data has been cut to fit a specified visual representation.

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.

Scientific publications are very guilty of bullshit. Scientists and researchers have the same motivations and desire for career advancement than anyone else. They employ the "prosecutors fallacy" in which a positive result in the test may paradoxically be more likely to be an erroneous result than an actual occurrence, even if the test is very accurate. This comes into play when the size of the matching is ignored. P hacking is a HUGE source of scientific bullshit where a researcher will curate their data to get that glorious p<0.05 to claim statistical significance. Significant results are over-represented in the data with negative results being published far less because they are less sexy. This can greatly skew and entire field. The media gets a hold of this bullshit and only publish positive results which are later debunked leading to mass disillusionment in the scientific process which is indeed still very sound. When a metric starts to become a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

The good news is that you don't need to get into the black box of the stastistical analysis of research to call bullshit. Remember the great tactic: if it's too bad or good to be true, it is. Our authors here give us some very good advice: ask yourself a few questions: what's the source? how do they know this? what are they selling? Avoid confirmation bias. Look at what the data is going in and what they are spitting out. When you call bullshit, it is a performative utterance. Be accurate, be correct, be humble and be kind. Also, pick your battles, you cannot call out ALL the bullshit.

Most of all remember this: the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself. ...more

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Feb 25, 2021 Will Ansbacher rated it really liked it

A very useful little book that provides techniques for detecting and calling out both bullshit and lies, with a particular focus on quantitative science.

The authors (who teach a course based on this material) observe that one significant issue with science is the specialized language and insider techniques that make it impenetrable to the outsider, something that doesn’t apply so much in other fields such as advertising or politics. And precisely because of that barrier, “science-y” language ha A very useful little book that provides techniques for detecting and calling out both bullshit and lies, with a particular focus on quantitative science.

The authors (who teach a course based on this material) observe that one significant issue with science is the specialized language and insider techniques that make it impenetrable to the outsider, something that doesn’t apply so much in other fields such as advertising or politics. And precisely because of that barrier, “science-y” language has been co-opted by other disciplines intent on bullshitting.

But the authors emphasize that it often isn’t necessary to have detailed knowledge of any discipline in order to see through lies and disinformation. They point out that essentially all research involves some kind of “black box” containing procedures (such as advanced statistical methods or analytical techniques) that are accessible only to experts in the field and whose details are mostly unknowable to the non-specialist, but in the end can be reduced to:
Data -> Black Box -> Output
And indeed, for systems like AI or Machine Learning, they note that even the practitioners don’t know what’s inside the box. Thus, it’s often sufficient just to identify inconsistencies in the input or output, which would invalidate anything that happens in the black box.

So “Calling Bullshit” involves critically examining the input assumptions, and the authors provide many examples and strategies for doing that. Yes, you do need a certain level of numeracy here – knowledge of averages, order of magnitude estimates, cause and effect and the like - but it isn’t necessary, for example, to have a detailed understanding of statistics to discover that Selection Bias exists in a set of assumptions. That chapter on selection bias was one of the most entertaining – it explains why your friends really do have more friends than you do (on average, of course!)

The authors do distinguish outright lying – where the liar goes to some length to make their lie believable - from bullshitting, where the shitter doesn’t even care whether you believe them or not, but that isn’t the main point of the book. A particularly good example is Wakefield’s dangerous and fallacious vaccine-autism link.

The final chapter is about how to call (refute) bullshit and to get bullshitters to stop; I’m less convinced here, though. Be correct, be charitable, admit your own faults, be clear, be pertinent – yes, these are all necessary, rational responses, but may not be sufficient. You do have to choose your battles.

...more

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Dec 19, 2020 Farhana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science

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.

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.

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 ...more

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May 15, 2022 Paul Fulcher rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022

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.

The subtitle, "The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World", would be a more accurate description of this book, although the authors do seem rather proud of the main title, with the word 'bullshit' featurei ...more

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Dec 11, 2021 David Rubenstein rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics, psychology, science, mathematics, nonfiction

This is an entertaining book about recognizing bullshit, researching and calling it out. Much of the book describes the various types of bullshit, and the research required to snoop out its origin. Then, a short portion of the book is about calling it out; how to call it out, and even when to call it out. The book is filled with anecdotal bullshit, and the research the author used to ferret out its origin. Much of the bullshit is unintended--it is simply a matter of passing along incompetent ana ...more

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Jul 09, 2021 Andy rated it liked it

Skepticism is important, and so I applaud these professors in their mission to fight BS, and much of what they talk about is important and true. But a lot of it is esoteric trivial examples. I'm disappointed because I was looking for a book on how to beat the very dangerous bullshit threatening the world today (in areas like pandemics).

Also, I can't get around the fact that you have to go deep into any topic before you can say something meaningful about it. And so this survey of all kinds of bul ...more

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Jan 18, 2022 Lada added it

If you are a data scientist or if you are already a Carl Bergstrom fan, this book is probably not for you. You might encounter some new examples and find the humor enjoyable, but much will already be familiar since it is written for the most general audience.

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Jun 22, 2020 Ramona Mead rated it liked it

Shelves: advanced-copies

I was expecting a light, funny, informational read when I selected this book. I should have known better with terms in the blurb like "expertise in statistics" and "examples of selection bias!" Don't get me wrong, this is an incredibly interesting book, and there's humor. It's thorough and it is DENSE, full of graphs and equations and research examples. It was over my head at times. I had to read small portions at a time (and sometimes re-read them) but it makes a lot of sense to me how we as a ...more

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Dec 29, 2021 Susan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, books-i-own

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift
Just what the doctor ordered for the current state of the world. Super informative, enjoyable learning, brilliantly explained with lots of everyday relatable examples- highly recommend this especially considering the nonsense that we end up consuming daily on social media in the form of stats and graphics (this has especially spiked since the pandemic began!). As a researcher it is my job to be able to see through the noise in ...more

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Sep 05, 2020 Grrlscientist rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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.

— Idealist philosopher John Alexander Smith (1863–1939)

Spin. Fake News. Conspiracy theories. Lies. We are daily confronted with a stinking quagmire of misinformation, disinformation and fact-free drivel ...more

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May 01, 2020 =^.^= Janet rated it it was amazing

Shelves: zz-2020-rev-wir

As someone who was recently roasted and bullied online as they did not believe that I am a superspeed reader, (they even sent me links to articles that state that speed-reading is a fallacy and a farce..and the language got really bad after that ... on their side as they blocked incoming messages) Yes, I read that fast ... it is an eidetic memory thing that runs in my family but do I remember the book a week later? Mostly ... plot, ending, etc. but I certainly do no memorize it!

What kind of wor As someone who was recently roasted and bullied online as they did not believe that I am a superspeed reader, (they even sent me links to articles that state that speed-reading is a fallacy and a farce..and the language got really bad after that ... on their side as they blocked incoming messages) Yes, I read that fast ... it is an eidetic memory thing that runs in my family but do I remember the book a week later? Mostly ... plot, ending, etc. but I certainly do no memorize it!

What kind of world do we live in that people bully each other on #goodreads ??

Back to business....

When life for the entire universe and planet turns on its end and like everyone else you "have nothing to do" while your place of work is closed and you are in #COVID19 #socialisolation, superspeed readers like me can read 250+ pages/hour, so yes, I have read the book … and many more today. (I have played a "zillion games" of scrabble, done a "zillion crosswords" and I AM BORED!!!)

I requested and received a temporary digital Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley, the publisher and the author in exchange for an honest review.

From the publisher, as I do not repeat the contents or story of books in reviews, I let them do it as they do it better than I do 😸.

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.

It’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound. 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 scepticism.

The book dissects and repackages this subject expertly as every single day I hear "fake news / I did not tell people to inject themselves with Clorox / tanning beds are why I don't have COVID19 / etc etc. etc." This book can help you understand it and work through what you hear and make it make sense for me. This is expertly written and explained to the common reader: it is scholarly yet totally understandable. This would be an excellent book club pick as all of our kids are addicted to their screens and the bullying there and we need some help working through it. An excellent book and an excellent read!

As always, I try to find a reason to not rate with stars as I love emojis (outside of their incessant use by "🙏-ed Social Influencer Millennials/#BachelorNation survivors/Tik-Tok and YouTube Millionaires/etc. " on Instagram and Twitter... Get a real job, people!) so let's give it 📱📱📱📱📱 ...more

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Sep 11, 2020 Sam rated it really liked it

I'm giving this four stars and probably only skipping the fifth because of the pop title which undercuts the seriousness of the topic, IMO. Logic and Rhetoric have all but disappeared from educational programs when they were once mandated. Misinformation, disinformation and the manipulation of information seem more pervasive since, and I could claim a causal relationship, but would I be correct? It doesn't matter. What matters is that one understands what determines a causal relationship from a ...more

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Sep 30, 2020 Jessica Stover added it

Currently reading this one, but noticed that no one has yet dropped the link for the professors' course at UW, which has been available online since before the book was finished: https://www.callingbullshit.org/sylla... I'd also like to add some context.

I made author CT Bergstrom's acquaintance over the early winter after finding his course online. In addition to studying disinformation, he's a bio professor and career epidemiologist, and his Twitter feed is why I was prepared earlier than nearl Currently reading this one, but noticed that no one has yet dropped the link for the professors' course at UW, which has been available online since before the book was finished: https://www.callingbullshit.org/sylla... I'd also like to add some context.

I made author CT Bergstrom's acquaintance over the early winter after finding his course online. In addition to studying disinformation, he's a bio professor and career epidemiologist, and his Twitter feed is why I was prepared earlier than nearly everyone for the pandemic, and was able to begin preparing family (which was not a simple matter at that early date, when there was still a lot of hesitation). It's not just that I had hand sanitizer, toilet paper and was ready to shelter at home: at a time when the lockdown hadn't yet begun and we had no testing and therefore didn't know the local numbers in our region, his scientific posts along with those of the colleagues he elevated like STAT News reporter Helen Branswell and Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch may have saved lives in my circle in particular, and certainly saved that of others in the wider world. You might have seen him on the BBC etc. early on when he appeared to help educate the western world when the "flatten the curve" chart first began circulating. Here's more about that: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/scien...

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.

I hope the ideas within are widely circulated, understood and applied by readers. If you're curious, I expect that your library already has this book available for you to browse, and to see what you think.

A related text I'd also suggest (and that is included in the authors' coursework) is Carl Sagan's wonderful The Demon Haunted World, which remains a must-read and as a bonus can be casually enjoyed chapter by chapter over time. Each section is an essay that works independently and within the whole. ...more

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Jan 09, 2021 Darren Douglas rated it it was ok

A lot of reviews waxing lyrically about this book but it's just too dense. You can easily glean all the information you need from the comments section on Goodreads...
And it started so well...hmmm. Around chapter 3 it all gets a little repetitive, stats are fired off to support the hypothesis of recognising bullshit but sadly ends up sounding like bullshit itself.
Boil it down, it isn't hard to recognise bullshit if you use common sense, I don't need citations and theroetical ramblings to do so ...more

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Dec 15, 2020 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: must-read-in-2022

At first I thought this was going to be a rehash of all the other books out there on cognitive biases, but it turned out to include quite a few things I haven't heard articulated very well, like how the scientific process and publishing industry work, and about AI and big data (this section was excellent). This is a book I could happily recommend to others as a primer on critical thinking and spotting, ahem, bullshit, especially on the internet. The authors did a really good job of not making it ...more

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Sep 29, 2020 Luke rated it it was ok

Was this book bull-shitting me??

I found it too dense - to many examples and cramming to much in. Also found it had negative lilt to it making it even heavier. A lot of the stats methods I've learned before and was fine to read about them again but I didn't feel like they were effectively training the reader to be able to call bullshit.

I think it would have been more effective to give the reader an actual headline, ask them to pause and think about the ways it could be bullshit and then the autho ...more

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Jan 31, 2021 Glen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: self-help, how-to, nonfiction, firstreads

I won this book in a goodreads drawing.

A book that shows you how to think critically. Could be useful. Unfortunately, it relies on Snopes for some of its examples, and they've shown they can't really be trusted. "Fact checking" has become just so much...BS.

Still, some useful stuff here. ...more

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Feb 09, 2021 Kaethe rated it really liked it

Shelves: requested, social-issues, nonfiction, skepticism, science, math

Like everyone else, I believe that I can't be fooled by...anything, ever. Knowing that it's just that certainty that makes one vulnerable, I deliberately give myself little booster shots of skepticism by reading every one of these books that comes out. But despite having a longish career in medical research spent dealing with data, there's always something. These days I think my greatest vulnerability is my own experience: often I overlook the simplest grounds for calling bullshit while trying t ...more

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Jan 07, 2021 Philipp rated it really liked it

Shelves: on-thinking, non-fiction

I guess this is Sagan's Demon-Haunted World for 2021? Both authors go through the most common ways that data is used to bullshit people and to create narratives. It grew out of a university course (Calling Bullshit) and goes over ways data is misrepresented, chosen, how sometimes counter-intuitively data can be interpreted, how people trying to sell you stuff or ideas can manipulate data to tell the story they want to tell,

So if you want to learn how to spot when someone tries to BS you, go for ...more

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Feb 20, 2021 Nalini rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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.

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 cli ...more

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Sep 08, 2021 Arpit Agrawal rated it really liked it

It is a nice and to-date summary of how and why bullshit spreads, how to protect oneself from it, and finally how to protect others from it. Over the years of dealing with such bullshit, I had been able to develop most of the rules of thumb mentioned in the book but it was still nice to see it all structured in one place. Giving it 4 stars only because while the execution was flawless, there wasn't much new to learn for me ...more

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Mar 09, 2021 Amirmansour Khanmohammad rated it it was amazing

A fascinating read, great ideas from causality to statistics, from ethics to science.

After reading books of Neil Postman, I always regretted that he couldn’t see the internet and social media era to adjust his brilliant books accordingly, but with reading this book, I think the gap is filled.

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Sep 20, 2021 Andrei Prodan rated it it was amazing

Excellent!

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Apr 07, 2021 Raghu rated it it was amazing

There was a time when we trusted a news item if it appeared in one of the reputed media outlets. Newspapers like New York Times, Washington Post, and newsreaders like Walter Cronkite had the credibility and trust of the public. But things are not that simple anymore. Lies, disinformation, and misinformation have been around ever since humankind invented the printing press. We have added fake news, fake images, and fake videos to this collection in the era of the Internet. Sharp political polariz ...more

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Aug 07, 2020 Tomas H rated it really liked it

Shelves: the-economist-reads-more-than-i-do

It is currently August 2020 and there is a peak volume of bullshit in the world right now. Feel free, my fellow readers in the future, note this date of August 2020 for those of you who find this review, and search who the US president is right now and look up something called “Pizzagate” that I am embarrassed to say I saw a friend re-post on social media a lengthy explanation of how utterly true it is. Again, it is August 2020. Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory in 2016. Bullshit can make a come ...more

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About Carl T. Bergstrom

Carl T. Bergstrom

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Books by Carl T. Bergstrom

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