I listen to audiobooks while I run, drive, and do other mindless tasks. I listened to two audiobooks recently that form a nice pair: Calling Bullshit, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, and Talking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Bergstrom & West are academics; Gladwell is a journalist but, in this book, draws pretty heavily on technical research.
Bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.
Definition by Bergstrom & West
Our brains have evolved to interpret the world in a certain way. Some people exploit our inability to correctly decipher information for amusement; others, for more nefarious purposes; still others fall for their own bullshit. For example, there are some students who will present graphs that purport to show some interesting phenomenon that they discovered. In reality, the phenomenon is just noise that looks interesting because they have zoomed way in. I mean, there isn’t really a difference between 0.9 and 0.899999, but if those are the only two points you have, you can draw a line and extrapolate a trend.
The most egregious cases relate to politics. Some people will take a survey or research result WAY out of context. Others simply make stuff up that has a certain truthiness. As I often say, 48.2% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Suppose I tell you that 447k global COVID cases were reported yesterday. Is that good or bad? Well, there are 7.8 billion people in the world, so that’s less than one case per 20,000 people. Put that way, it sounds OK. Or I could tell you that it’s less than 1/3 of the peak daily report. True, but that peak only happened on one day and appears to be a reporting artifact. Or I could tell you that it’s the same as we had on October 21. Or I could tell you that the cumulative case count is 113M. That’s 1.5% of the global population! All of these different ways of looking at the situation are objectively true, but posed differently.
So if you’re writing about the success of vaccines and asserting that we should get back to normal, you can note how far the case rate has fallen. If you’re writing about the danger COVID faces, you can note the cumulative case count—a number that can only increase. Humans are bad at contextualizing numbers, so maybe you provide a graphic—but again, different scales tell different stories. If you only show the case rate for 2021, you will tell a different story than if you include all of 2020. (You can play with these perspectives yourself on the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 Dashboard.)
Why does bullshit deceive so many people? In Gladwell’s book, he describes truth-default theory. We are biased to assume people are telling the truth. Depending on the situation, it takes an almost overwhelming amount of evidence for you to think someone is deceiving you. A prime example Gladwell gives is Bernie Madoff. It took years for people to finally accept the possibility that he was a fraud. In retrospect, there were red flags all over the place, but nobody could conceive of someone being that big a fraud.
The only way we can make sense of a world awash in bullshit is to choose who to trust. Once you have chosen your sources, truth-default takes over. Usually, your chosen sources will be people who are similar to you: similar ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic class, religious and/or political allegiance, and so forth. We set aside whatever defenses we have against outsiders and fully believe whatever an insider tells us. Thus we become susceptible to con artists, from Bernie Madoff to Jayson Blair to Steve Bannon.
One alternative is to trust nobody. Gladwell gives a couple of examples—an analyst who identified Madoff years before everyone else; police officers. But that’s no way to live. Without trust, our society breaks down. Without trust, we end up afraid of the world. Extreme cases end up recluses, unable to leave home because of their fears.
The other alternative is to trust in God. No human is fully honest—we are all sinners. Jesus is the way we can know God, and through God we can know the Truth.
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” … 15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
John 14, selected verses
We cannot know whether a person is being honest with us. All we can do is love one another, and trust that God will be with us. We may be deceived from time to time, but that is the price of love. I believe that if we send out love, we will receive love in return. Maybe the Madoffs of the world will take advantage of us, but we will still have abundant life, a life full of love.