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

by Carl T. Bergstrom

With all of these potential penalties, it’s often better to mislead without lying outright. This is called paltering.

An important genre of bullshit known as weasel wording uses the gap between literal meaning and implicature to avoid taking responsibility for things.

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

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

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 problem is canonized in a principle known as Goodhart’s law. While Goodhart’s original formulation is a bit opaque,fn8 anthropologist Marilyn Strathern rephrased it clearly and concisely: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.