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. 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.

One particularly valuable section focus on the issues with the p-value used in many scientific papers, for example how, while this can (with certain biases) answer a question about the probability that the null hypothesis is true, a failure of the null hypothesis is then often used to confirm one particular alternative hypothesis, which is a different question altogether.Most of this book is stuff that I (and probably many readers) am familiar with intellectually but don't necessarily apply reflexively whenever I read the news or hear a statistic. So for me, this book was really useful in that it primed me to intentionally be on the defensive about common misrepresentations in statistics and data visualization. Disinformation relies on trusted people in your social circle spreading bullshit. The bullshit propagates because people have emotion over a headline and repost without doing any vetting whatsoever. Computer generated faces are created now as profile pics for fake accounts and they can be very convincing. Bots are in fake real people with fake identities with a very real agenda who get retweeted by the likes of The New York Times.

What’s left that becomes bullshit is when a person lives the lie, to a degree where the person doesn’t see it as a lie. This removes a conflict between one’s ego and alter ego. To that extent, to utter bullshit is more moral than to utter lies. For a politician it is the only way to mentally survive without looking at oneself in the mirror and seeing a consumate liar. Technology has made the bullshit problem much worse. Forget the all-seeing eye of AI and tech, if you start out with garbage training programs for the algorithm, you will get garbage out. Is it any wonder that a paper claiming to recognize criminality from a picture would produce nothing but utter bullshit if the input data was headshots of non-criminals and MUGSHOTS of convicted criminals?

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Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

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?

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So how can one hope to rid the world of increasing levels of bullshit? Since it’s easier to create bullshit than to refute it, simply refuting each new instance of bullshit seems like a losing battle. The better strategy is educational; if you can inoculate enough people against falling for bullshit in the first place, bullshit never gains enough traction to require costly efforts at refutation. There are dozens of things like this. People who are pessimistic die young, people who are less confident in their memory are more likely to get dementia, people who walk more slowly are less confident in their health and will therefore die young. The possibility that people are accurately judging their own health status is occasionally raised but then dismissed. (Sometimes the studies controlled for other possibilities, but did they control for enough ?) 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. So why bother “calling bullshit”? As the authors assert, adequate bullshit detection is essential for the survival of democracy. Regardless of political ideologies, democracy has always relied on a critically thinking electorate, and this intellectual skill is more important than ever in this modern age of online information warfare. It also is critically important for proper functioning of any social group, whether it is a small group of friends or some other social group, or a professional community. 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.