I now find myself feeling so deeply that I am unable to articulate the pain I feel. So instead of me putting what I have learned or experienced into a poorly written novel...I told myself that there isn't a book on how to deal with your bullshit....

I have no idea why Ally McLeod was referred to. He wasn’t so much confident as simply deluded – surely there is a big difference. 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 clinical trial and the cohort selection is explicit, but the authors show that variants of selection bias are at the root of many other pervasive statistical curiosities (e.g., the observation that the majority of people have fewer friends than their friends do). 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. There's a chapter on causality and the authors mention smoking and cancer as a "clear-cut" causal link. But that's no explanation: just saying it's obvious should ring bullshit alarms. It would have been instructive to explain how we know that smoking causes cancer. We do know that. It is true. It can be explained to people. You can show them the overwhelming evidence. You can explain the Uncle Norbert fallacy. But that takes time. More importantly, getting citizens or even doctors to read the original science is not how the progress in tobacco control was achieved. A very useful little book that provides techniques for detecting and calling out both bullshit and lies, with a particular focus on quantitative science.That pseudoscience is being hawked to vulnerable patients isn’t a new problem – cancer scams have existed for decades, and combating them was the impetus behind the 1939 Cancer Act. The substantial difference now is the ease with which falsehoods can be disseminated. Cancer surgeon David Gorski, professor of surgery and oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan and managing editor of the online journal Science-Based Medicine, notes that cancer misinformation is “way more prevalent now for the same reason other misinformation and conspiracy theories are so prevalent – because they’re so easily spread on social media.” Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming Spin. Fake News. Conspiracy theories. Lies. We are daily confronted with a stinking quagmire of misinformation, disinformation and fact-free drivel. How do we sort the truth from the lies? This is the premise of the timely new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Allen Lane/Random House, 2020), a book that effectively acts as a field guide to the art of scepticism. 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. i Whiffing (had to look it up) means missing the ball – it is onomatopoeia, the swishing sound as you miss. So one is unlikely to whiff a golf ball and send it into a lake.

Instead of following Wittgenstein’s example, there are ways we can politely call bullshit. The first step is to calmly ask what the evidence says. This is likely to temper our interlocutors’ views, even if the results are inconclusive. The second step is to ask about how their idea would work. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil at Yale University found that when they asked subjects to tell them, on a scale of 1 to 7, how they would rate their knowledge about everyday objects such as toilets, most people would say about 4 or 5. But when asked to describe precisely how a toilet worked, they dropped the rating of their own toilet expertise to below 3. Asking over-confident bullshitters exactly how their idea might work is another way to slow them down. Finally, ask the bullshitter to clarify what he means. Often, bullshit artists rely on ‘zombie nouns’ such as ‘globalisation’, ‘facilitation’ and ‘optimisation’. Pushing beyond linguistic boondoggles helps everyone to see what is solid and what is clothed in ornamental talk. I have long thought that there ought to be a vaguely educational TV show called Correlation Street, with each episode lasting two or three minutes. 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. Then there is the misleading biases in data visualization. After the Florida "Stand Your Ground" law was enacted, a figure seemed to show at first glance, a drop in homicides. A close look at the vertical axis shows that it was inverted, giving the wrong impression. It turns out that the author of the figure did not intend to mislead, but used an unfortunate representation of the truth.To be fair, the study tries to look out for this by controlling for disease severity. But I would imagine that spouses are better judges of a person’s overall health than a four-category NYHA classification .) She sounded so much like Carrie Fisher that that is who I pictured reading this book to me. Beyond that, it’s a solid self help book with a curse word in the title, irreverent and funny while pulling down some common sense. See the Tweets of Biden and Harris for Memorial Day last weekend, and the video of Trump with the widow and son of a US Marine killed fighting for the US.

Therefore it is a little disturbing to think of a person who is good at self-judgement and poor regarding self-discipline with a correspondingly low self-confidence. Low self-confidence would seldom, I think, be the result of an accurate estimate of your condition on the matter in question + your just as accurate understanding of your (poor) self-discipline. This point it seems to me that both Robertson and his critic are missing. Recently I was at a kind of launch event for a new data science unit. At the end of the teaching demo, a government representative stood up and said that a good 95% of data science graduates are not good for their purpose, they can run algorithms and analyse data but they have zero critical thinking skills, and sometimes present results that are obviously nonsense if you stop and think about it. West/Bergstrom identify this too: The book ends with two empowering chapters on how to spot and refute nonsense and, more importantly, how to do so in a useful and constructive way. Stanislaw Burzynski in 1997 at the federal courthouse in Houston, Texas, where he faced 34 charges of mail fraud, which were dismissed, and 41 of violating FDA regulations, upon which the jury failed to reach a verdict. Photograph: Pat Sullivan/AP

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My experience is that generally speaking, the people most likely to be blessed with that most precious of resources – confidence – are those most likely to deny its relevance. People stigmatized by class, gender, race, physical appearance or disability seldom do this. White, male, middle-class, western, public-school-educated men (all like me except the class and education bits) are often blind to the crippling and undermining effects of low confidence and enormously advantageous effects of high confidence. When you’re heartbroken, what do you hear? You can’t love anyone until you love yourself. When someone’s hurt you? Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission. When you’re just a little too positive? Expectations lead to disappointment. Similarly, the things that I've seen that are promising for fighting global warming denial involve taking people out into nature or doing experiments and hands-on demonstrations of the evidence. But I can't imagine a scalable approach for doing that with tens of millions of people. And that would not stop the endless flow of money and beautifully-crafted lies from powerful special interests. 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.