Well, more privileged people are also more confident. Ditto for athletes with bodies that allow them to excel better than my own. Indeed, if confidence isn’t based on something tangible, isn’t it really just overconfidence? So simply telling people to “be more confident” may not be based on much at all. Ally MacLeod never promised that Scotland would win the World Cup in 1978. But he did think they would be good enough to make the third-place playoff. So creating bullshit is easy; refuting it is hard. And it is precisely this asymmetry that explains why bullshit persists and how it can even grow over time.

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. But no doubt you remember that the smoking-lung cancer link was established on the basis of such correlational evidence, as was the whole health-movement deriving from the entirely correlational Framingham Study. This study resulted in a 50% reduction in heart disease over 50 years because people learned – via correlational data – that exercise, diet and blood-pressure control made them healthy and stopped them dying. Intriguingly, the entire literature on information literacy - with a nearly 100 year heritage - is missing from this book.

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). Currently reading this one, but noticed that no one has yet dropped the link for the professors' course at UW, which has been available online since before the book was finished: https://www.callingbullshit.org/sylla... I'd also like to add some context. Selective bias is the reason for a lot of bullshit. This occurs when a survey or a statistic is unintentionally biased in the sampling population. The author describes the situation for waiting for a bus at the airport, for your particular brand of rental car. It always seems like all of the other busses pass you by, before your bus arrives. This is not a coincidence; it is a statistical rule when busses tend to get clumped together instead of arriving equally spaced in time. The author also explains why people who are dating seem to meet nice people who are unattractive, or attractive jerks. This also is not a coincidence; the book describes why this happens! It’s intriguing to be lambasted with the same rhetorical excess and scientific imprecision that one is accused of perpetrating.

The mandala workshop bore many of the tell-tale signs of bullshit. The session was empty of facts and full of abstractions. Participants skipped between buzzwords such as ‘authenticity’, ‘self-actualisation’ and ‘creativity’. I found it impossible to attribute meaning to this empty talk. The harder I tried, the less sense it made. So, during the event, I politely played along. Tom, you clearly think confidence is a cod and this strongly-held opinion trumps a fair-minded scrutiny of the scientific literature. The authors are expert guides. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist who researches how information flows through biological and social networks. Jevin West is a data scientist who studies misinformation in science and society. Together, they teach a popular undergraduate class offered under the same name by the University of Washington. The first character would then think about it for a moment and say ‘Yes, your’e probably right’ before, now happily much the wiser, getting on with their shopping or whatever.So after surfing the web to find a blank template for the well known Dummies novels....I thought it was both humorous and appropriate. 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.