Living in The Bullshit Era

I want to suggest to you that we are living in the Bullshit Era.?I am not saying this just to swear at you and catch your eye, although it did cross mind that it does so.?I want to contrast what science, and the discourse derived from science, was like before data was freely available, and today.?I then want to suggest that the solution to Bullshitters is already available to us.?It just needs us to dust it off, put it back where it ought to be, at the heart of our thinking, and then we can all crack on again.

Learning vs Thinking

As an undergraduate at university, I wasn’t very good at learning because I liked to think, not to learn.?This is a problem.?Often you don’t have the basic skills needed to tackle the problems you are thinking about.?You can’t think about the area of a triangle without some maths.?Similarly, quantum mechanics is impossible to understand without probability theory – it just doesn’t make any sense.?My best guess is that the reason that quantum mechanics is so weird is because humans are so bad at probability.?We know we are bad at understanding probability because when a couple of psychologists tested people’s ability to do simple probability assessments in the real world (using statistics, not common sense), it turned out they were fundamentally biased.?A Nobel prize for economics for Daniel Kahneman ensued.?Amos Tversky wasn’t alive to share it.

Thinkers Without Tools

When you want to think, but haven’t put the hours in to learn the tools relevant to the problem, you have a few choices.?You can buckle down and do the hard yards and learn the skill you need, or, you can shy away from any problem for which there are specialised tools; Don’t do physics or economics if you can’t do maths, in fact don’t try to do anything scientific or pseudo-scientific if you can’t do a bit of maths, you won’t get published without a t statistic and an r squared.?Instead lean into the wordy subjects or something practical, because language and tool using is what many of us humans naturally excel at

An alternative is to tackle the problems with the wrong tools.?Chat about using calculus, use metaphors from housekeeping to describe economics, whistle biology, make musicals about history.?Essentially use the tools you have to hand, to tackle the problems you face, regardless of whether or not they are the right tools.?The universal tools in this world of words are oratory and prose, the twin arts of persuasion.?These are powerful, if indiscriminate tools in the hands of the lazy, but the bright.?They can be applied to any problem and influence others to believe that you are right, whether you are or not.

Before Bullshit

Before Bullshit, was a time when there were many questions and few answers.?Facts were hard to find, and it was expensive in terms of time and effort to dig them out.?Libraries were full of books and books were produced by publishers, at great expense.?If you wanted to know, say, the population of Senegal in 1952, you would have to make a considerable effort to find out that single data point.?Similarly, the number of refugees in Germany or Turkey, was a number that to a first approximation was unknowable without significant effort.?How then did we establish broad consensus on questions like population development or migration when data was hard to come by??There were people who knew this stuff was important, often academic institutions and government bodies, and data started being collected in the C19th and C20th centuries in all sorts of realms.?

Where I work, in the University of Oxford, there are some long data runs, because the University itself has had a long run.?For example, academics in Oxford have the world’s longest data set on the life of great tits.?This year it celebrated 75 years tracking a population in Wytham Woods, a university owned wood near Oxford. ?Today it is useful in assessing climate change, but nobody knew that 75 years ago.??There are lots of other long data runs, but the real characteristic of the time before bullshit is the absence of data, not its presence.?Crick & Watson cracked the structure of DNA using data created by Rosalind Franklin’s work.?It was the rare data that was the key to cracking the problem.?Franklin too died before a Nobel prize was awarded.?

In a world where data is expensive and hard to get, you can achieve great things by carefully collecting, curating and examining it.?In my own field of business, the great management thinker Peter Drucker coined the widely quoted aphorism “what gets measured, gets managed”.?Data determines a great deal about the world we live in.

The Proliferation of Bullshit

On June 24, 1986, Al Gore introduced s2594, Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 “A bill to require the Office of Science and Technology Policy to report to the Congress on fiber optic networks and other options to improve communications among supercomputer centers and users in the United States” and a trickle of bullshit was unleashed on an unsuspecting world.?

The trickle started to become a flood when Tim Berners Lee developed hyper-text markup language (HTML) at CERN in 1989 and it was released to the world in 1995 as HTML 2.0.?The infrastructure of the internet and the language of the World Wide Web came together, and a flood of data became readily accessible.

The internet slashed the cost of accessing data.?It took me less than 2 seconds to find out that population of Senegal in 1952 was 2.6m.?I also found out that it was growing at 2.41% at the time.?I discovered that Germany had 1.24million refugees before Putin invaded Ukraine, and Turkey hosts 4 million, the most of any country in the world. (The UK, where I am sitting, hosts 135,912).?All this data came to me nearly costlessly.?The impact of this change has been profound.

On Bullshit

In 1986, the same year Al Gore “invented” the internet (to quote some widely held bullshit), Harry G. Frankfurt wrote an essay in an obscure journal, Raritan Quarterly Review, titled “On Bullshit”.?He opens by saying;

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us.”… "we have no theory”

Frankfurt distinguishes between liars and bullshitters.?Liars know they are lying, they do it knowingly.?Bullshitters are different.?They have an opinion and they set out to support it.?They accept their own opinions because that is deeply appealing to us all, and then go on a mission to prove that they are right.?They do not know how to think and therefore default to bullshit.

Think Like a Scientist

The question we therefore face is how to think, when we don’t have the tools to tackle the underlying problem we are thinking about.?How can I assess quantum mechanics, Thatcherite economics, vaccine efficacy or anything else when I just don’t have enough life to learn how to do these things myself??I can give up, and say I am too stupid to have a view, but there lies the road to serfdom.?

The solution is really quite simple, read one chapter of one book, written in German and published in Vienna in 1934: “Logik der Forschung”.?Can’t read German??No, me neither.?Thankfully it made it into English in 1959 as “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” by Karl Popper.?Popper makes a simple and compelling argument that allows us all to start to evaluate other people’s arguments, even experts in fields we know nothing about, and separate out the science from the bullshit.

Popper argued that science is a process based upon a simple set of steps: first think about the question at hand.?Then come up with a conjecture about what might be going on.?Then try really, really hard to refute your own conjecture using data from the real world.?Don’t try and prove it, try and reject it.?If you cannot reject it, and you tried really, really hard to do so, then you can carry it forward as a theory that has been tried and has yet to fail.?This is science.?Conjecture and refutation, based in data, not theory and proof.?

This is also how statistics works. You have a null hypothesis – this model is wrong – and we try to reject it.?If we cannot reject the hypothesis, we carry forward the model as one to be used and tested again (and again, and again).?A theory gets stronger as it passes the relentless tests of rejection, but it never becomes completely true, it is just useful.?

The great physicist Richard Feynman used the analogy of trying to figure out the rules of chess when you can only imperfectly see what’s going on.?You might work out that bishops move diagonally and rooks along rows and columns quickly, but the movements of knight might take a while longer.?Pretty quickly you might figure out how most pieces move and become confident that you had a general theory of chess moves.?Then someone castles – what the hell was that move??Taking a pawn “en passant” is even weirder, our theory is wrong!?But chess is a deep rabbit hole and we are in danger of losing our way.?Feynman’s point, drawn from Popper’s insight, is that your theory can work well in most situations, but then it can be revealed to have a flaw, and you know this because you are trying to spot rejections, not confirmations.

So, scientists work by saying – here’s my guess about how this thing works, if I am right the world will look like this.?They then check the world.?If the world isn’t like the theory predicted, the theory is wrong and you go back to the drawing board and have another go (with some new insights from the failure).?Nothing ever becomes “proven” or “true”, it just works, or it doesn’t.?General relativity and quantum mechanics can’t both be right, because they predict different things about the universe, based upon a different set of assumptions about how the universe is set up (so I am told by those who really understand these things).?But they both work really, really well in their realms.?General Relativity predicts how big stuff moves in the universe with astonishing accuracy, quantum mechanics does as well with really small stuff – some of the predicted outcomes of both theories we didn’t even know existed until the theories suggested where to look to find them. The question then becomes not which one is right, but rather what new theory can do as well as these existing theories across the whole range of size of things (if things exist)??Scientists do not search for truth; they search for things that work using conjectures and refutations.

Bullshit and the Internet

The internet, with its bottomless pit of data, conjecture and mindless drivel is an ocean upon which the bullshitters set sail.?Just as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot could sail against the wind to America courtesy of the developments in ship rigging in the C15th century, so every bullshitter on the planet now has free access to data that can validate their opinions.?To turbocharge the bullshit, the internet also by-passes all those publishers and libraries that were curating data in the old world, because now we have platforms to broadcast self-validated opinions (including my own) to the unsuspecting world and algorithms and network effects to target our opinions on those who agree with us.

We have taken away editors and publishers and reviewers and the whole panoply of structures built in the free speech world to damp down bullshitters and in its place, we have a free-for-all that favours confirmation, not rejection.?(S)He who shouts loudest gets most likes or is retweeted the most, is an influencer and therefore commands the resources of our economy.?[ ] was elected to their position based almost entirely on following a strategy based on an understanding of this bullshit method. [You can put your own favourite bullshitter into the blank, we all know them – they are the people who don’t agree with us!]

A Bullshit Filter

How do we filter out the bullshit??My suggestion, is to go back to the ideas of Popper as expressed by Feynman and ask yourself: “how can I check if this intuitively and emotionally appealing idea isn’t just me bullshitting myself?”

Try to answer the question, if I am right, what would the world look like??Then go the next step and ask, what data could I check to see if I am wrong? If we do the same to every politician and influencer who is trying to catch our attention, the bullshit should be dampened down.?We can’t check everything, but we can try and check the important things.?This was how I found out that the UK did not pay ￡350m per week to the EU, but that my fellow UK citizens really did want to leave the EU, which as a liberal internationalist, I found genuinely heart-breaking.?

Just ask, what if I am wrong, not, how do I prove I am right??It is harder, and much more disquieting, than you’d imagine.?That’s probably another reason why bullshitters don’t do it.

References

Drucker, P.F., 1973. Management: tasks, responsibilities.?Practice,?125.

Feynman, R.P., Leighton, R.B. and Sands, M., 1965. The feynman lectures on physics; vol. i.?American Journal of Physics,?33(9), pp.750-752.

Frankfurt, H.G., 2009. On bullshit. In?On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.

On Bullshit (csudh.edu) accessed 23rd June 2022

Popper, K., 2005.?The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/senate-bill/2594 ?accessed 23rd June 2022

History of the Web – World Wide Web Foundation accessed 23rd June 2022

For Harry Frankfurt on the subject see:

Bullshit - Good Stuff (jamesgood.co.uk)