Book review: Calling Bullshit – The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

I recently finished the book Calling Bullshit – The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West. I found it a very entertaining read, and especially useful in this day and age of social media, fake news and deep fakes. Calling out bullshit has been necessary for a long time (to call out snake oil sales men for example), but it seems this topic has become more and more relevant lately. As someone who’s working with data daily, I can definitely recommend this book.

It’s written by two professors, so it’s sometimes a bit academic (e.g. there’s some explaining of statistics), but everything is laid out in such a way anyone can follow along. The writers also tried to write a “neutral” book, meaning they didn’t give examples of how one particular political viewpoint uses bullshit all the time, but rather they illustrate their cases using examples from all over the spectrum. Except if you’re an anti-vaxxer. In that case, you’ll be singled out 😉

The book starts off with explaining what bullshit can be, why the book is necessary, and then dives deeper in the well known “correlation is not causation” principle. The authors also covers various types of bias and they have a splendid chapter data visualization and how you can distort the truth by manipulating them (I definitely picked up some ideas for my data visualization presentation). There’s also a chapter on big data (remember the Google Flu incident?), but it actually was more about machine learning and A.I. then actual big data (which are of course related). There’s a chapter on the problem of science and the need to publish as many papers as possible (and get cited), and then the book finishes off with how you can spot and refute bullshit.

All in all, a good read, especially if you dabble with data.