[D66] Calling Bullshit

[R.O.]

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/563882/calling-bullshit-by-carl-t-bergstrom-and-jevin-d-west/


        About Calling Bullshit

*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.*

Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s 
increasingly difficult to know what’s true. 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.

You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with 
data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is 
the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? 
Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational 
biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection 
bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and 
causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.

We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether 
within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of 
a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of 
skepticism.


        Praise

“The information landscape is strewn with quantitative cowflop; read 
this book if you want to know where not to step.”*—Jordan Ellenberg, 
author of /How Not to be Wrong/

*“If I could make this critical handbook’s contents required curriculum 
for every high school student (thus replacing trigonometry), then I 
would do so. I highly recommend /Calling Bullshit/ for our modern 
existence in the age of misinformation, and regret only that I didn’t 
think of the title for my own book.”*—Cathy O’Neil, author of /Weapons 
of Math Destruction/*/
/
“I laughed, I cried—to read Bergstrom and West’s great examples of 
‘bullshit.’ This is a gripping read for anybody who cares about how we 
are fooled (and how not to be), and the connection to numeracy and 
science. But it’s also just great fun. This is a necessary book for our 
times.”*—Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate and professor of physics, 
University of California at Berkeley
*
“If you want to read what will surely be a classic, buy /Calling 
Bullshit/. It addresses the most important issue of our time: the 
decline in respect for Truth. It is also a literary masterpiece. Every 
page—indeed, every paragraph—is a new bit of fun.” *—George Akerlof, 
2001 Nobel Laureate in economics
*
“Each of us now swims through deception so pervasive that we no longer 
realize it’s there. /Calling Bullshit/ presents a master class in how to 
spot it, how to resist it, and how to keep it from succeeding.”*—Paul 
Romer, 2018 Nobel Laureate in economics

*“Part playful polemic and part serious scientific treatise on a plague 
that ‘pollutes our world by misleading people about specific issues and 
. . . undermines our ability to trust information in general’ . . . a 
statistically challenging master class in the art of bullshit 
detection.”*—/Kirkus Reviews/*

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