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

by Carl T. Bergstrom

SCIENCE IS HUMANITY’S GREATEST INVENTION. Our species has evolved to act within a narrow band of time scales, ranging from a few milliseconds to a few decades. We have evolved to operate within a similarly narrow band of spatial scales, ranging from micrometers to kilometers. Yet temporal and spatial scales of the universe run from unimaginably larger to incomprehensibly smaller. Science allows us to transcend these limitations. It gives us the tools to understand what happened in the first picoseconds following the Big Bang, and how the universe has evolved over the 13.7 billion years since. Science allows us to model the internal geometry of a single atom and to grapple with cosmological distances so large that we record them in light-years. For all that it does, however, it would be a mistake to conclude that science, as practiced today, provides an unerring conduit to the heart of ultimate reality. Rather, science is a haphazard collection of institutions, norms, customs, and traditions that have developed by trial and error over the past several centuries. Science is culturally contingent on its emergence from European natural philosophy as practiced a few centuries ago, and evolutionarily contingent on the cognitive capacities of the species that practices it. Science is jury-rigged atop the evolved psychology of one particular species of ape, designed to provide members of this species with adequate incentives to work in concert toward a better understanding of the ...