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

by Carl T. Bergstrom

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it.”

If religion is the opiate of the masses, Jersey Shore and Temptation Island are the spray canisters from which the masses huff metallic paint fumes.

In a word, we triangulate. We no longer trust a single message, a single image, a single claim. We look for independent witnesses who can confirm testimony. We seek multiple images from multiple vantage points.

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.

This erroneous attribution of causality is the same mistake that the natural health community makes in ascribing autism to vaccination.

There is a key distinction between a probabilistic cause (A increases the chance of B in a causal manner), a sufficient cause (if A happens, B always happens), and a necessary cause (unless A happens, B can’t happen).

This is how cover-ups work at scale. People like to believe in massive conspiracies that keep some story—alien corpses on ice in Area 51, a moon landing staged in a Hollywood studio, CIA involvement in 9/11—undercover. But no one can keep a secret that big. Rather, the really big cover-ups take place out in the open, as climate denial does. The smoking gun is there for everyone to see; the cover-up is providing people with alternative reasons to believe it might be smoking.

In a social media environment, the posts that are spread most widely are often those that shock, spark a sense of wonder, or inflame feelings of righteous indignation: namely, those that make the most extreme claims. And the most extreme claims are often too good or too bad to be true.

Myths are the most difficult to debunk when they are interwoven with a person’s worldview and sense of cultural identity.