Bad Advice: How to Survive and Thrive in an Age of Bullshit

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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 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. iii To me repeatedly is not twice. If you say he failed repeatedly – nah, that is not just twice. Harrington put his ball in the lake – sorry, burn – twice. Dr. Venus Nicolino (AKA "Dr. V") is the host of Marriage Bootcamp Reality Stars, and previously starred on Bravo's LA Shrinks. She's been featured on Real Housewives of New Jersey, Millionaire Matchmaker, Steve, Watch What Happens Live, The Dr. Oz Show, Rachael Ray and The Real.Dr. V holds a Masters Degree from New York University in Counseling Psychology, a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology and a Doctorate Degree in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. She lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband and children.

Hell, I even tried to read a few autobiographies and although they brought me temporary solace, I realized that there's still something out of touch. 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.”Despite negative publicity, it’s business as usual for Burzynski. If anything, crowdfunding may have made his clinic more popular. In lieu of scientific evidence, it relies on gushing testimonials to lure new customers, though in some cases, these come from patients already deceased – a fact absent from the promotional material. More generally, it regularly quotes studies which seemed odd — so I went and looked about two dozen of them up. Studies into things like whether wearing a lab coat makes you better at concentrating, or whether being told that you’re smarter makes your brain look different in an fMRI scanner. Time after time, it was an unpreregistered study looking at 27 undergraduates which barely reached statistical significance. I am, I’m afraid, extremely not confident that most of these studies would replicate (and several of them definitely have not).

Booster shots. This is a good one. Like many others, the authors have feared to be dry or boring and in consequence are entertaining as hell. These guys have had a live audience to practice on so they are particularly clear, straightforward, and spot on. One, simply odds calculations, which a person may be accurate or inaccurate depending on the person and the activity. 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 .) Ranging from honesty to happiness, Bad Advice touches on different aspects of the available situations and explains the bad and good sides of them in detail. Besides, it helps me feel fulfilled after finishing each chapter and motivates me to explore more. 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.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). 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? 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). 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. It’s intriguing to be lambasted with the same rhetorical excess and scientific imprecision that one is accused of perpetrating.

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 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. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global WarmingEO’s book surprised me in how spiritual and deeply philosophical he approaches/assesses the challenges we face in life. It is not about techniques but his coaching is about mindset to manage your path in life. Essentially, while doing the shopping in Rita’s Kabin* or whatever, one character would relate to another character a story of two correlated events (or a specific phenomenon or state of mind/nature and an outcome). They would then suggest that the correlation is the causation. The other character would scratch their chin, consider their story, and say ‘Ah, but correlation is not causation’ before positing a more likely explanation for the event/outcome. It is when you lie to yourself that one veers to bullshit; but it is still not quite bullshit but more about a person revving up their confidence, requiring that they bury or suppress any sense of uncertainty or hesitation. This book teaches us how to identify the various forms of new-school bullshit: how to evaluate scientific claims, to distinguish between correlation and causation, to recognize biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, to identify selection biases in samples, to understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more. They also include lots of graphs and other data images so you can practice spotting screwy data representations yourself. Whether you are confused by the anti-vax movement, which grew out of a single retracted medical study, to the claim that Artificial Intelligence can infer sexual orientation from analyzing a photograph of a person’s face, there is no shortage of nutty ideas out there to contemplate and dissect. 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.