Bullshit - Carl Bergstrom 058

title: Bullshit - Carl Bergstrom 058
author: Intangibles
contenttype: podcast
publication: Intangibles
published: 2021-07-12T04:04:30
sourceurl: http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1085901436-intangibles-bullshit-carl-bergstrom-058.mp3

word_count: 10587

Welcome to Intangible's podcast. I'm Steve Berg, your host. Success is driven by how, as much as by what? How we communicate, how we lead, how we relate to our environment, are all vitally important. Intangible is a podcast that explores the underlying traits, qualities, and behaviors that improve the how. This is accomplished by finding the people who have studied and been successful practice in these soft skills and having informed conversations with them to get to what is learnable. Let's begin. How many times have you listened to someone spouting something utterly ridiculous and not been able to stop yourself from saying out loud, that's bullshit. Bullshit, also bullshite or bull crap is a common English expletive, which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initials BS. In British English, Bollocks is a comparable expletive. It's mostly a slang term and a profanity, which means nonsense, especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. In the situation that I just described, the good news is that you've spotted bullshite and released the frustration of being fed it. The bad news comes when you don't actually spot it and you internalize it, perhaps unwittingly becoming a purveyor of it. Today, I'm going to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about bullshite. Dr. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. You're probably thinking in yourself, wait, what does a biologist know about bullshite? On that point, when I first approached Dr. Bergstrom in the fall of 2020 about coming on the podcast, he said, look, I'd love to, but I've been spending a whole lot of time working on COVID-related issues, to which I replied, oh, right, you're a biologist. That does seem important, as you were. After a couple of awkward months, here we are in the spring of 2021, and with a light at the end of the tunnel, Dr. Bergstrom was finally in place to be able to say, game on. But, as an answer to the question, besides being a biologist, Dr. Bergstrom is an outspoken critic of low quality or misleading scientific research. He's the co-author of a book on misinformation called Calling Bullshit, the art of skepticism in a data-driven world. And he teaches a class by the same name. He's got his own Wikipedia page so you can look up the other amazing things he's up to. And I'll let him get a few words in as well. Dr. Bergstrom, welcome to Intangible's podcast. Well, it's great to be here and glad we finally managed to connect. It's been a busy last year for all of us. Yes. Monumentally busy comes to mind for you in particular. Anything that I failed to mention about your background that you would like to emphasize? Oh, no, nothing I'd like to emphasize. There's lots of good things to miss. Okay, so we'll make that as a homework assignment for folks that might be listening. Okay, so I gave a definition of Bullshit. Would you like to alter or augment that definition in any way? Yeah, I mean, I think your definition is good. You know, for it's there are lots of different ways to define what this is. Strangely enough, it's actually a topic of that's been the subject of considerable philosophical investigation. There's a there's a book by Harry Frankfurt that sort of brought the question, what is this stuff Bullshit that is so prevalent in our in our world? How does it differ from lies and so forth? And so my co-author on the book, Jeven West, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what Bullshit actually is. For us, you know, we think it involves the use of language, statistical figures, data graphics, all kinds of forms of presentation to persuade or impress an audience by distracting them, by overwhelming them, by intimidating them, presented with a blatant disregard for truth, logical coherence, or what information is actually being conveyed. I mean, I think that's, you know, the what is it? Liars figure and figures lie and Liars figure, how does that go? So I think something like that exactly. I think the notion of the fact that people do it with intent, and they do it with numbers to make it seem like it's something when it's not that that really that's the thing that really makes me hot about it. Right. There's this lovely quote from from Freud that we have in here that just is the perfect perfect illustration of of what Bullshit is if I'd love to share that with you in your audience if I could. So so this is this letter that that Freud wrote to his fiance in 1884, and he says, and he's talking about a public lecture he gave, he says, so I gave my lecture yesterday, despite a lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without hesitation, which I ascribed to the cocaine that I'd taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn't understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it. So he's trying to impress them. He is trying to overwhelm them to some degree by talking about these difficult things that he knows they won't understand, and there's a blatant disregard for the information that he's actually conveying to them. He doesn't care whether they understand what he's saying, and then he's bragging about it, and he's high on coke the whole time, which is, I guess, a bonus. And the thing is the offended way to which he refers to someone in his social circle that's not part of that, like, yeah, I really snowed those guys. And it's amazing. Yeah. So, you know, the interesting thing is there's a bunch of underpinnings to bullshit, and you highlighted a number of, like, I certainly want to get to the point where we go, all right, we've identified it, what do we do to combat it? But let's set the table a little bit, like, there's some principles, right, that you thought were significant, but let's, let's, you know, what do you want to tell us about that? Well, there's some sort of basic principles or laws or something like that of this nascent field of bullshit studies. I think maybe the most important one is called brandolini's principle. And this was developed by a Italian software engineer, and he says, look, the amount of energy it takes to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. And so this is sort of like, this is the fundamental problem that we face with all of this is people can easily put misinformation out there, and then it's an enormous pain to come back and try to clean it up because it just spreads, and it spreads very, very fast. That's an old observation, you know, so Jonathan Swift wrote about this hundreds of years ago, it says, you know, falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after. So it's this notion that lies have wings in ways that it doesn't. And then Uriel finale has another variant on this, which just has to do with intelligence. And he, Uriel finale says, you know, an idiot could create more bullshit than you could clean up. And so there's all of these, you know, levels of complexity that that sort of, I mean, I think it was just the stoichiometry of bullshit is like so, you know, stacked against us, right? It's easy to produce. You don't have to be intelligent to produce it. It spreads rapidly. It takes enormous amounts of effort to clean up, and that's kind of what we're dealing with in a bullshit rich world. And it explains so much about what's gone on, you know, recently up through the election at least, right? Like just the, I guess we'll talk about flooding the zone with it, but it just it got right. It just explains like how hard once misinformation exists in the world it is to like realign people to the truth. Absolutely. The books got a great, you, you actually lay out a fairly comprehensive case. I don't know how deep you would want to go, but you told the talk, you talked about this guy Wakefield. And who's the guy that that basically kind of is the father of the whole anti vaccine movement, right? That's right. That's right. You know, I think there's a bunch of lessons there. I don't know. Do you think it's worth spending a moment to just go through in a minute talking about that? I mean, so this is a really interesting example. Wakefield, you know, it's tragic. And we're still, of course, dealing with the ramifications right now as we try to, you know, combat vaccine hesitancy around COVID-19 and in this pandemic for all of us. So, but what happened was in 1998, Wakefield published a high profile medical papers suggesting that there was a link between the measles mom's rebella vaccine in March and autism. And this was based on a very small study with about a dozen participants. And there were some problems with the inclusion criteria in the studies and problems with the analysis. There were a number of undisclosed conflicts of interest in terms of who was paying for the study, their motivations, Wakefield's holdings and related enterprises and so forth. And, but, you know, this, this, it was a, it was a stunning hypothesis that was put out there, but it definitely caught people's attention. And people looked into this to see whether this could possibly be right. And the scientists, the science was, was overwhelming in response that this was, that this was not correct. So, there is no link between the measles mom's rebella vaccine and autism. However, you know, the after the initial refutations, this didn't go away. In fact, it kept growing. It sort of had a life of its own that's become the current current anti-vax movement. And because of that, scientists kept working on that doing larger and larger studies with hundreds of thousands of participants. There is perhaps never been, you know, a claim in medical science that has been so rigorously debunked as, as this claim. And yet, it doesn't die. And, you know, so people are just grinding and grinding and grinding away at, you know, showing that this is wrong over and over and over again. And there's Andrew Wakefield, dating El McPherson. So, you know, the life's not fair, man. Well, so, I mean, and it keeps getting worse. They're like, hey, look, you're wrong. And he doesn't back down. He keeps going after it, right? And it's, there's a, like you said, he's financially motivated by things that he owns, you know, the conclusions were incorrect. He gets, he gets this bar, not just bar, he loses his medical license. He loses medical license exactly. And still yet, he refuses to recant, which, you know, again, that, you know, as long as the person who said it won't correct their error, there's a, there's doubt, right? And, you know, the high thing that you highlight is the massive amount of unnecessary energy to go and clean this thing up. Exactly. And I think that's, you know, this is a really extreme example, but I mean, you can kind of pick any example you like. And you see a lot of this. I mean, this is part of why it took me so long to get on your podcast was, you know, at working at the intersection, I'm trained as a mathematical epidemiologist. I've been studying misinformation for the last several years. And so, you know, working at that intersection, I've been very busy for the last year. And an awful lot of my time, you know, I spend a lot of time doing the basic mathematical models to sort of figure out things like, you know, what cadence do we need to test people in order to safely reopen schools? And that sort of stuff. But I spend half of each day trying to clean up the BS that's getting spread out there because in public health, if the public doesn't understand what we're being asked to do, then people won't do it. And that's to everyone's detriment. So it's sort of critical that people properly understand what's going on here. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah. And people, people will accept both wittingly and unwittingly. Let's, you know, we started, I was starting to bring some of the reasons, the motivations that one might have. Let's, let's talk about why do people bullshit? Why do they bullshit? Yeah, well, there's a whole lot of different reasons, I think, you know, I think that one of the key things to recognize, you know, when, with, especially with bullshit, like even more with lying, you know, Harry Frankfurt says a liar knows the truth and is trying to lead you away from it. A bullshitter doesn't either doesn't know the truth or doesn't care about the truth. And just wants to be impressive. So so much of the time when people are bullshitting, they're just trying to, you know, sound impressive, sound persuasive, that sort of thing. Or even just get your attention, right? It's a, it's a, it's a, you know, if we think about bullshit headlines in the, you know, on social media or in the news or whatever, you know, so much of bullshit headlines are just clickbait. They're trying to grab your, trying to grab your attention. And so, you know, people, people bullshit to make you think that they know more than they do to impress you, to get your attention. So there's a lot of that. And then there are other sort of related kinds of misinformation that you might not classify as, as bullshit, exactly, that, you know, that, that people provide for different reasons, right? I mean, of course, you know, one of the, we have these rules for how do you, how do you spot this one? You ask, ask some questions and you say, well, you know, who's telling me this? How do they know it? And what are they trying to sell me? Everyone's trying to sell you something. So, you know, some of the lies come because people are trying to sell you something and it may be a product or it may be an idea, right? You know, so there are, you know, there are a whole bunch of different reasons why, why people do this and, and obviously you can dig quite deep into it. But I mean, maybe that scratches the surface, anyway. It does. I mean, the thing that really bugs me, or worries me is probably even a better, more accurate is they do it for control, right? They do it to generate influence that, that, that, that might induce a person to take an action, right? Yeah, this is a really important point, right? So, I mean, this is like the double edged sort of communication. At this, you asked at the start of the program, what's a biologist doing thinking about misinformation? And I've actually been writing about biological communication for over 25 years. And in particular, the questions that have me interested are, you know, why is it that animals tell each other the truth enough that they listen to each other? Why don't they just lie to each other all the time? And the, the powerful thing about communication is, right? So now, with communication, I can tell you things you don't know. But if you actually pay attention, that gives me a handle over your behavior. Yeah. That's a very, very dangerous thing. And so, you know, that's the, that, and that gets back to your issue of control, right? I mean, it's when I communicate with you, if you're going to bother to listen to me, it's because you think that what I tell you might influence your actions. And if you're letting me influence your actions, that gives me the potential of controlling you. Yeah. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the societal compact in just a second. But I think the, the outcome of that societal compact is that, that people can't exert control. Yeah. Okay. So that, so that, you know, as I alluded to at the beginning also, and of course the book does a way better job is, you know, some people can spot bullshit. Some people actually want to be bullshit. You know, they, they, they, they, they, they kind of, they're up for it. They're up to be influenced. So why, how, maybe better any question, how does bullshit work on us? Yeah. So I mean, there, there is a really good observation that the best misinformation, really all the successful misinformation has a kernel of truth in it somewhere. And because that makes it credible, that makes it hard to separate from, from untruth. I mean, there's a lot of effective, there are a lot of details of sort of like, you know, what makes an effective story. Right. Having something that's simple, having something that has a kind of direct point, and get a clear, you know, maybe almost black and white lesson, something that taps into human fears. I mean, this is one of the reasons that the anti-vax narrative was so successful. I mean, there's nothing we worry about as much as, you know, say harm to our children. You know, here, here, I think, for example, when I was a kid on Halloween, you know, your parents would always go through the candy to see if there was like a razor blade in it or poison in it. And, you know, the, I mean, I even remember like the local McDonald's pairing with the police department to put metal detectors to run your candy through in the, in the McDonald's. And it's, and so, you know, this was tapping into this deep fear, like this essentially never happened. There were, you know, and it basically never happened in like the sense of an anonymous person just doing this to harm random kids. But, you know, this was the, you know, the 1980 version of all the, you know, bullshit memes that go flying around the internet was somehow like the entire United States convinced itself. And I think probably panic and there's an element of truth. Because if you think back to this, we were also facing, remember, you know, a lot of people have forgotten, people might generate of, you know, before after my generation don't even know the Tylenol scares. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. And so there was this kernel of truth was like, you know, a madman could be putting poison into consumables that kill all of us. And, and so, you know, that somehow that one took off. And I think that's, I think that's, you know, sort of what makes the most successful bullshit take off. The other thing, you know, is, is often, you know, we're as human beings, we're primed to see patterns in the world. We're trying to, and, and this is how we are successful generalists. This is how we are good at everything from finding food to impressing people to, you know, building good shelters to whatever it is that we do. Right. But we over generalize. And so if someone says, hey, look, this pattern is meaningful. It's causal. We're very primed to accept that and to, and to run with that. And so that seems to be a very common form of, of BS as well. It says, oh, you know, A happened and B happened. So A caused B. And so we have a whole chapter about that in the book and the, and the fallacies that arise there. I see news outlets and I see politicians very often put, you know, correlate things when they're clearly aware that there's no causation. Yeah, I think that's, I think it's a really common risk. And, you know, I think we say in the book that, you know, correlation doesn't imply causation, but it doesn't sell newspapers either. And so, you know, that's why you'll see that happen in the, in the press. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that you commented on is, it's almost like an Occam's razor, right? If it's a really easy answer, right? That makes it really easy to accept. Absolutely. And if it's really easy to accept, then you're going to be lazy and you're going to err on the side of accepting it rather than thinking about and rejecting it. I think there's certainly a lot of risk of that. Yeah, you're right. So, alright, so that's how, right? I guess the next, you know, if we're working through our journalistic, you know, questions, our next thing is why. And I know that that's a much more complex answer. So, you know, we can unpack it in a couple of different questions, but let's maybe just start with, you know, in your impression, you know, why do people get away with it? You know, we clearly can see it. You know, even people that are on the same side as you can tell when you're bullshitting, right? And yet they get away with it. They don't get checked on it. They don't get called on it. They don't get penalized for it. Why do people get away with bullshit? There's so many different elements to this. And I think a lot of them have to do with, again, sort of human cognitive biases and things, which is, by the way, not my expertise or the focus of the book. But it's, you know, an important thing to think about here. You know, for example, we are very vulnerable to confirmation bias. And that's one of the things we really encourage people to work on in improving their bullshit detectors. If you, if you tell me something that's kind of, you know, questionable that confirms my preexisting beliefs about the world, I'm very unlikely to question it. Whereas if you even give me hard evidence, good hard evidence that, you know, contradict some of my beliefs, then I'm going to really dig into that and see if I could find reasons to break it. And we can be such good motivated reasoners that as we, you know, that we can find reasons to disbelieve the things that we want to disbelieve. So there's an argument in this sort of the philosophy of missing for enough philosophy, the sort of psychology of misinformation about about, you know, whether, you know, how people's general critical thinking skills relate to their susceptibility to misinformation. And well, that's still an open argument. What one side is, you know, argues fairly compellingly that actually people with strong critical reasoning skills may be as susceptible because they're quite good at talking themselves into reasons to believe what they want to and disbelieve what they want to disbelieve. Yeah, you literally in your mind, you can say, hey, look, this is a good case. This is a compelling case. Just because you happen to be, you know, particularly good at selling stuff, right? Right. You know, I mean, so that's one reason you another thing to think about right is we live in this information environment that we that we describe as, you know, torrential addictive, unreliable and insincere. Right. And so there's just where the information that we're presented with in 2021 is so different than what we're presented with even 20 years ago, where it hasn't, you know, it's coming, a lot of it's coming through social media. It hasn't been vetted by editors or producers or whatever the case may be. The pace is enormous. It's a combination of what's made possible on the internet with the, you know, natural consequence of the development of the 24 hour news cycle. And so we're just inundated with enormous amounts of information and we cannot possibly afford to go through and vet all of it. So the easy way out is to just accept it. You pick your filter and say, oh, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to believe my friends and relatives and just accept what they say. And the problem is, is that, you know, Uncle Joe is like a, you know, it's gone completely off the deep end and but you're just reading what he's sending. I'm going to invent my own bias. I'm going to call it the where to start bias, right? Which is literally like, you know, there's such a torrent of this out there that it's just impossible to know even with a smartphone that I could check on the spot in seconds. I have a truth teller right in my hand. I'm just going to be like, that's like, there's a gazillion things. I just, I can't. But I don't know where to start. I might even say this in the book. I've certainly thought about a lot, you know, is that, I mean, I still remember when my best friend got a blackberry and he downloaded the, the nascent Wikipedia, you know, this was in the right at the very start of the Wikipedia onto this thing. And for like three days, he was an enormous pain because every time you'd be trying to have a conversation, he'd be like fact checking you on the, on the blackberry and it's just like, God shut up. And, but I, you know, at the time I would have thought, you know, if, you know, if you told me, oh, yeah, in 20 years, everyone's going to have this like, you know, amazingly powerful computer in their pocket that can look up the world, some of the world's knowledge, you know, instantly and fact check any proposition. And I said, God, you know, the bullshit's going to be gone. But instead it's the opposite. And that's, it's because of these things that you're talking about. I mean, it's opposite. In now, we've got a bullshit spreader. That little fact checking thing in my hand now gets the bullshit to me faster. Right. We don't use it for the fact checking. We just use it to spread. And, and that's, yeah. So, so I definitely wouldn't have anticipated that 20 years ago. So, I think that, you know, one of the reasons that people get away with it is the bullshit or nose. You know, they're not going to, they're not the barrier to acceptance. You know, they're not, they're just not going to do the work. I can say this. I'm not going to suffer consequences because they're not going to do the work. Right. Right. I think there's a lot of that. And then, you know, there are also different. There's also different regimes in terms of like where we impose consequences on people for for bullshitting and not. Right. So, you know, and most of the, you know, most of the harmful, harmful bullshitting is this sort of stuff we would impose consequences for. So, you're sitting around with your friends, you know, telling, you know, stories of your, you know, crazy, crazy driving adventures or your things you did in camping trips where you almost died or whatever. You know, if you're embellishing the stories, no one's going to hold that against you, right? It's just you're having a good time fricking some peers. Right. Yeah. You know, I think the other thing is that has really been striking to me lately. Just more visible examples is there's just a lot of cognitive dissonance in the world where people have a world view. And they don't want that world view to be disrupted by the truth. Right. And so they'll, they'll, they'll really do some unnatural things. They'll be willing to believe a lot of really weird things so that their normal mental world order doesn't get disturbed. I think that's right. And I think yeah, we definitely see, we definitely see people very vulnerable to that. And I mean, it's one of the things we have to do, of course, is realize that. That it's not just people. It's like us too, you know, Neil Postman, the great sociologist, his, he was the first person to write an academic paper about bullshit and 67 when it was quite a, you know, radish 68 was quite a radical thing to use that word in the scientific paper. And, and one of the things he has in that paper is his, his third law of, of bullshit, which is in any given time, the source of bullshit that you have to be most concerned about is yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sad but true. Probably guilty as charged if I really think about it. I know I am. Okay, so there's a couple of reasons I think that that that bullshit actually takes a backseat to the truth. I think there's a, there's a, there's a, Yeah, what goes on in your brain, right? Yeah, that is part of it. You know, I, whenever I talk behavioral psychology with folks, there's, oh, I'm always curious about the, you know, what's happening inside our mind that allows to do it. There's, you know, you know, you talked about negative experiences or fear or, or I think it's, I think it's, it's possibly the range of emotions good or bad, right? You know, I think bullshit is a lot about a dopamine hit. Yeah, I do not have the expertise to, to, to be able to say one way early, you should talk to, you know, David Rand or, or one of the people, Gord Penny Cooker, someone like that doing this stuff because I just don't have the philosophical background. I mean, I can, I can speculate, but you know, guess what I'd be doing if I did that. I should, I would, I would be bullshitting you. So, okay, sounds, sounds plausible to me, but I'm not going to make something up to, sure, sure, sure, sure. All right, but I think then with that, with that as a setting aside as a seems reasonable. It feels to me like the, you know, the id is the thing then that we probably can talk about with some credibility in that, you know, okay, a person as a personal motive to be able to do it or a person as a capitalistic motive, yeah, yeah, to want to want to allow the backseat. Yeah, are you willing to, to go out on that branch a little or not? Well, I think, yeah, I mean, we can look at the way that the structure of, of the delivery of information today encourages this sort of thing. So we talk about this in, in one of the chapters of the book. You know, we used to, it used to be that you'd form sort of a long term relationship with a newspaper or with a news anchor or something like that where you turn to this person or to this source and you sort of read that. I want to subscribe to the, to the Washington Post instead of the Wall Street Journal or whatever it is. And you make this long term decision about where your information is going to come from, but today I open up my cell phone, you know, it gives me a set of news stories right there in the little Apple news thing. And I can read, you know, this in-depth analysis of, of, you know, some of the proposed changes to the tax code and, and that starts to look pretty interesting, but then right below that there's, you know, nine cats that look like Disney princesses and boom, I'm clicking on that I'm giving into my base instincts there. And it's not just nine cats that, that click on that look like Disney princesses, which is sort of, you know, waste of time, but, but harmless, but it's also misinformation, it's also deceiving stories, it's also exaggerations of the truth. And so we talk in the book about how, you know, once you start in a, once you move toward click based advertising and having instead of subscription based advertising. And once you have these different, you know, stories from different outlets, competing head to head right against each other, there's sort of a race for the bottom and the end of the, you know, the simple truth is no longer good enough right you have to exaggerate you have to find these exciting stories you can't have a story that says, you know, scientists discover, or the latest study on red wine, you know, gives a gives a slightly more optimistic view. That maybe we can indeed drink red wine to prevent heart disease and most scientists we talk to say, yeah, that might shift our beliefs a little bit it's got to say red wine cures heart attacks big blazing letters right or else no one's going to click. And so there is this, you know, sort of race to the bottom just because of the delivery technology that we that we have now and and you know that's something that we have to find ways around. But it's appealing to, you know, again, it's appealing to our notions to try to collect, you know, important information and facts quickly and to not waste our time with nuance in this torrent of information that's coming in. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, that's an example of capitalism working against itself right, I mean that's the, that's the, that's that's ideally a better serve model, which is killing us. Okay, so look, we've established then that like the, you know, there's no longer the editors and the, you know, producers and people that are filtering things for truth. So what that means to me is that the impetus is on us, right, bullshit is a caveat, emptor proposition. It, it kind of is, you know, so, so the book, you know, sometimes people describe the book as saying, you know, oh, you're saying that that, you know, everybody has the obligation to, to spot bullshit because no one else is going to do it for them. And there may be little elements of that, but the, you know, the real message in the book is that everyone can be empowered to do this and that it's not as hard as as you might think and there are some fairly simple rules of thought and habits of mind that you can train yourself to. To be able to do the book is actually largely about misinformation that comes in quantitative form, we haven't talked about that as much, but that's fine. But, but even when misinformation comes in quantitative form and we don't think of ourselves as, you know, necessarily really, you know, math whizzes or stats guys or whatever it is, you can still spot this stuff pretty transparently. And so for me, it's really a lot about the importance of empowering people to, to spot this rather than saying like, hey, this is your problem and, and you have to do this. That said, you know, if we look at the different possible approaches to the misinformation problem, I mean, I see sort of three strands that people typically look at, you know, they say, oh, let's, let's go after this with, with technology. Let's develop AI to spot misinformation. I'm skeptical there, not a lot of development in that area and I think the power of sort of, you know, antagonistic machine learning and that sort of thing will, will, will may mean that's a, that's a game they'll be up bullshitters will win. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's still abdicating, right? That's still putting it in the hands of some place else to sort it out for us. Yeah, that is, that is, and which would be nice. And then, you know, another one is regulations. If you'll say, well, you know, maybe we can regulate our way out of this mess. And, you know, I'm very strong proponent of broad interpretation of first amendment rights. And I'm not, I'm not comfortable with that. There are other countries where people are more comfortable with that. But the bottom line is, you know, ultimately somebody with most of those approaches, somebody gets to decide what's fake news and what isn't. And that may have more to do with what that person likes than what's actually true. There are other regulatory approaches that can be, you know, possibly more powerful, you know, requiring more transparency in terms of the way that information is delivered to us. And so, you know, that's a whole nother discussion about what should the relation of users to social media and what amount of, be what amount of control should they have over the algorithmic presentation of content and so forth. But, but those are all going to be more subtle nudges. And then that leaves this, this third pillar, which is education and just teaching people to think more critically and recognize that the environment's changed. And we're in a information ecosystem that is more conducive to the rapid spread of bullshit than we've ever seen before. On the positive side, every time something new and scary happens in human technology that makes people think that we're all going to not be able to believe anything anymore and the truth is going to be lost, people adapt and people change. And so, you know, this was, there was this enormous moral panic when the printing press was was invented because people thought, well, now kids are going to be reading, reading junk, even the poems of Ovid. And just anybody can go print something. You don't have to be a nobleman to commission a manuscript anymore. And what are we ever going to do? And we've done pretty well. You know, with that. And I think we'll adapt to this as well. I think the most dangerous point is when you're sort of in the transition where you have where, you know, the new technology is out there. People are only starting to become aware of the potential for misinformation. And, and, and, and, and, you know, then we're really vulnerable. This is, this is, you know, we did this project about a couple of years ago to draw attention. It's called which face is real. It's a little game that was intended. You can log on and which face is real.com. And you can, and you see a couple of faces, one that's created by, by a deep learning algorithm, one that's real, and you have to try to pick. And the point of this was not actually to train people, you know, to be better at detecting these things because the faces will get better and better, but just to raise awareness that just because you see a face out there doesn't mean the person is real. And, you know, since we put that website out, you've seen quite malicious uses of this text. We've seen these fake faces used to alongside with political editorials being published. We have seen fake faces used in LinkedIn profiles that have managed to contact, you know, connect with sort of top government officials. So we've seen a bunch of these different kinds of malicious uses. And again, the most dangerous part is where, where you think that if you see a face, it has to be a real person. Once we know that faces can be created, we'll adapt to that. So I'm with you. I think that that third bucket that you're talking about, the, I'm going to call it the personal responsibility bucket is, I think that's, that's the, that's kind of the only way that I can see it working, right? And that personal responsibility bucket is critical thinking, being more media savvy, you know, actually taking the time and energy to fact check. And also just knowing the ways that numbers and pictures lie to people. I think that's right. And, you know, that's a real focus of the book, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're mentioning that, yes, there's a, there's a big chunk of it and, and like, you know, how to, how to look at a chart or how to understand is statistic, how to ask a question about it to really tell whether or not. Yeah. And so, and to me, that's the, you know, anyone listening, that's the hook way you should be buying this book, right? That's one where, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, or, or, or you could just, you know, you don't have to buy a book, you can just, we've got a website and check out calling bullshit.org or anything else and, no doctor, they need to buy the book. Okay. Okay. You can cut that out. All right. All right. So, um, okay. I just want to spend a little, a, a little bit of time near the end here, um, about the ways that, you know, this is the education part. The ways that people try to manipulate people, right? The, you know, the language, the strategy, the statistics, as you were referencing before, you know, that, that people will, you know, successfully manipulate other people to folk, to do things. I mean, we can, we can kind of go through it one by one. I mean, do you have any thoughts particular that you would talk to about language that people use or the types of language? Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, even the overall thing to recognize here is that language is such a sophisticated device. And the way that we use language is not just a state. Factual propositions, but we use language in a whole bunch of ways to convey meaning of many different types. And so we can, and so, you know, that allows language to be extremely expressive and allows us to, to use language and all kinds of socially powerful ways. It also opens up a door for people to, to misuse language. So you can, you know, we think of one of classic example where, where Bill Clinton says, you know, there's, there's, you use as a present tense when saying there's no sexual relationship with this person. And then later claims he wasn't lying because when he said it, it was already over. Or, you know, so, so, or, you know, I can say, there's this notion of, of, in, in picture where, where, where, you know, there's what you say, and then there's what someone in first from it, and this goes into the philosophy of language and, and, grace is maximums and all of this, but the, you know, if I say, hey, look, you know, that guy's not the most responsible father I've ever known. Then you'll start thinking like, geez, like, that guy might be a pretty bad dude. And what I mean is actually, no, my dad is the most responsible father I've ever known. This guy's probably second. Right. Right. But, but, you know, it's, or I could say like, you know, hey, you know, Oh, you know, Jeff in West, you know, my co-author. Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't shoot up at work. And, and you're thinking like, God, the guy's a drug addict. No, he doesn't shoot up at home either. I mean, so, and like, he can't turn around, sue me for saying that, but at the same time, it's, you know, it's because what you said wasn't false. Right. Exactly. And so there's a lot of latitude in language to, to do this. There's even a word for this, right, which is the word, paltering that's a, which is like saying things that aren't false that give a false impression, right, which is, which is really cool. So there's all of that. And then there's, you know, there's so much other ways to just use, so many other ways to just use language to kind of, you know, confuse the situation or throw a smoke screen or whatever. You're right. So you talk about, you know, why talk about like weasel wording, where you sort of put things into the past tense. And, you know, my favorite example of this, because it's humorous instead of tragic was mostly humorous is that, you know, a couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden's dog major was involved in a biting incident. Yeah. So, you know, with, with a security member personnel. So, you know, usually this is, this is used rather tragically to, you know, talk about things like, oh, you know, the, you know, this, this officer was involved in an officer related shooting incident or something like that. In other words, the officer shot somebody in the back. But in this particular case, it was major involved in a biting related incident. And it was left to the reader, whether the security guard bit major major bit the security guard, but, but major was the one who went back to Vermont. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. An old friend of mine, his favorite expression was a shoe obfuscation. Yes. Which is a, I think that's a, that's a, that's a perfect example of Paul's right. Exactly. Or like, what, where did you just say to me? Like, you know, language, language to obfuscate is, to me, the, the kind of most obvious. Yeah. All right. So we got language, language is good. There's people will use strategies. I mentioned jumping the gun a little bit, flooding the zone. Right. Right. This is so important. This has become, so this is like, it's been a huge shift in the, in the nature of propaganda. And propaganda used to try to get people to believe wrong things. And there is something that's, you know, known as the falsehood fire hose approach to propaganda. The Russians have used it very effectively. I believe in the, in the last decade in particular. And the idea is to flood the zone. And it's to flood the zone with a large amount of mutually contradictory information. So that ultimately people end up despairing for, you know, at any hope of ever getting to the truth. And so it's like, you know, if, if you're, if you're media feed is just full of like stuff that all of which, you know, they can't be simultaneously right. Then you just give up and you think like, I can't, you know, I can't, I live in a world where there is no access to truth. And that is profoundly disempowering. I mean, there's two things that really, when you, when you talk about that, there's two things that really like one, you don't know what to believe, right? You don't, you literally don't have, you don't, you can't even take a side, right? But then the other thing about that is, you know, we talk about the social compact in that you have to believe that there is a structure for delivering you truth or else you lose faith in many, many things. Exactly. And that, that burns it down. This, this burns it down. And this is, you know, this is why I was so distressed at the start of the, at the start of the pandemic by, by inadvertent mistakes in US messaging around the pandemic. This is by February say that created these same impressions. It wasn't, you know, here, here it was just an accident. But, you know, you had situations where you had simultaneous press conferences going on where one hand, the CDC is saying, hey, this thing is going to be really bad. Americans need to start taking preparations and White House officials saying, you know, there's 15 cases, but it's going down. And this is going to, it's completely under control. And, and, and we saw like repeated, you know, contradictory messaging coming out of our own government. And that makes you feel like, what do I believe? What can I believe? I can't trust anybody. There's, I'm, I'm, I'm disempowered. And, and I give up. And that's kind of the aim of falsely biohose propaganda. And that's, that's, you know, it's, it's, I think it's increasingly prevalent. It's super dangerous. There's something that's closely related to that one and look at strategies for propaganda. You know, if we look at, say, Russian propaganda in the United States across social media. One thing we see is we see, you know, there are messages sort of inflammatory messages on both sides. So you take a, you take an already contentious issue, whether it's, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement or gun rights or abortion or whatever it is. And then you push increasingly extreme views on both sides. And what that does, of course, is it gets people fighting gets people upset and ultimately creates a country where we believe that half of the people in our country cannot be reasoned with are not rational are not some people we can cooperate with and in shared governance and may even be evil. And if you do that, you've undermined the foundations of democracy. So, you know, that if we talk about like strategies, that's a very, very powerful strategy. If you can make every, you know, if you can make most people believe in the United States believe that half of the country is crazy. You've undermined democracy. This is, you know, I don't want to like, you know, be one of these like radical centrists. But I mean, we really need to get it together around this. Absolutely. And the thing about it, you know, what you, I think what you're coming on to is the volume of the megaphone, right? Like on one side, the amplification of the message is so loud. And on the other, the amplification of the message is so loud, kind of drowns out the rational people in the middle. Right. And who would want to be there? It's, you know, I've kind of sort of always thought throughout the pandemic. You know, if I, if I write a thread, I do a lot of public communication about this a lot on Twitter. And I think if I write a thread and I am not getting pretty aggressively attacked from both sides, then I really screwed up because I accidentally, you know, went way too far in one direction, stumbled onto one side or the other without meaning to Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so you see that, you know, you write something about, you know, what it takes to safely reopen schools. And if you don't have both sides yelling at you, you've, you've, you've probably missed the boat. Okay, I know we're getting near the end. I want to move a little bit faster. Do you want to say, I don't know, do you want to say anything about statistics or should we just leave that aside saying, hey, look, we could probably end up talking about that for an hour. Just go read the book. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that I think that I'll just say one quick thing about that, which is that the world is become so intensely quantified compared to the world that we lived in 200 years or 20 years ago, you know, we have the all of the data collection and data exhaust through our use of computer systems like Google and Facebook and Uber and you know, these systems know where we want to go, who we want to hang out with, you know, what we want to know about the world, et cetera. So we have all those sources of information. We have all the embedded sensing in our cities. We have, you know, my car logs every cylinder fire or misfire and then downloads that information to the auto manufacturer. This is completely different than the world we lived in 20 years ago in terms of the level of quantification. That means, and that quantification is very, very powerful, but and that is coming in this is largely a good thing. This is coming into the way that we are told about the world. If you look at the use of statistics in news stories, if you look at the use of data graphics in news stories, so these kinds of things. Numbers are given this certain authority were presented to the numbers. They're no longer this, you know, arcane domain of specialists. The thing is we haven't really been trained in school and so forth. The reason adequately about data and about numbers and the ways that graphs can mislead you in the way that, you know, if somebody rolls in with a number, it doesn't mean that that's like, you know, the absolute truth and you can't, you know, question how that number was obtained or why it's being presented the way it was. That's really the main focus of the book. I'll leave it at that, but, but that's kind of, you know, what we're really about. So I want to summarize what we, what I think we've learned, but before that, there's just some statistics about perasiveness of this in terms of technology that I just, I just think we've got to repeat over and over so that we can understand how massive and how potentially devastating this is. Do you happen to know if you can't remember them all all spout them off and you can make a quick commentary. Do you happen to remember the Macedonia fake news stats? Well, let's see. So, you know, getting something. Let's see. So, so with, you have these Macedonian teenagers that were creating fake news in order to simply draw ad clicks. They didn't care what people believed. It was classic bullshit. They just wanted to get their attention. And so they produced, for example, one of the probably the most shared or viewed news stories. I can't remember whether we shared or viewed, you know, during the 2016 election, which was that the Pope, the false claim that the Pope put indoors Trump. And that got a million, a million or more views. Maybe you have the exact numbers in front of you. I don't know approximately a million. But I think the significance is that juxtaposition against New York Times top news story at that time, got only 370,000 hits, right? Yeah, right. Third. So, I mean, yeah, it's because these, you know, it's like the unvarnished truth isn't good enough. I mean, like if I can think about what is it that will construct a story that will really get people's attention. And I don't have to wait for like that thing to happen. I can just make that story. Yeah. If I can't beat, if I can't beat what just is happening, then I'm not thinking hard enough. So yeah, of course, you know, like by by crafting fake stories, people could be really effective at getting people's attention. Again, that's the megaphone, right? And another one, which I need to comment on, you know, people beat up on Facebook a lot. And I certainly can jump on that bandwagon. They deleted three billion fake accounts, right? I mean, that's a decent chunk of all the accounts that are ever created. I mean, it's got to be like half of their, it's got to be equal like equal to your half of their user base or something. I mean, that's an intense amount of job to have to do to be able to ferret that out and that's right. And it's just, yeah. The last, the last stat that I think just illustrates the importance, not only the importance, but the magnitude or the stat you put in the book about the FCC comments on net neutrality. Oh, yeah, this was, this is really, really disturbing. This is sort of like a man in the middle attack on democracy. So it's this idea, you know, what sort of thing we need for democracy is to be able to communicate with our elected representatives and with the committees that that serve us and so forth. And when we had this issue about net neutrality in the United States and what we should do about net neutrality, the vast majority of the public comments that were received about net neutrality were our thought to have come from fake accounts. And, you know, over half of them were from these, you know, bought accounts that were sending large numbers of comments and people tried to track this down. And they, you know, some, they'd find some, you know, 87-year-old woman in Florida who'd sent a passionate defense of your passionate, you know, attack on net neutrality and they'd go, you know, someone would go knock on her door and ask like, you know, why did you send this comment? And, you know, the person had no idea that, you know, she'd sent the comment. She hadn't sent it. She didn't have internet. She didn't know what net neutrality was. This was really, you know, I still don't know who did it, but it was a really pervasive attack on democracy. And I think it was a very under reported story. Totally. Yeah, for there were nearly 22 million comments, half of them from fake accounts. Yeah. One bot sent a million anti net neutrality comments. Right. Right. Yeah. Russia was at least 500,000 comments. Right. All of them like trying to tear down net neutrality. That's right. Yeah. It is, it is a kind of interesting one to try to figure out, you know, where that came from. And I'm not an expert there, but there are a bunch of different, you know, both corporate and state actors that might have interests in there. So the last question I was going to ask, but frankly, I think we've done it along with our commenter is the ways that we combat bullshit. And, you know, I think, so you can summarize, I can summarize, but I think we've really touched on all of them. Yeah, I think we've touched on a lot of it. You know, I mean, for me, so much of it is, you know, recognizing the kind of world we live in and building the habits of mind to to spotted and to not share it. And one of the things we really promote at the center, we found that the University of Washington Center for the informed public is just a simple slogan, you know, think more share less. And so if you, you know, you, you read something on the internet, think more share less right when, you know, right when I, right when I got on this call, I was just looking at something that had come in. I was a little announcement that had been made by a health board in Canada, saying that said one in little graphics says one in 20 Canadian Canadians died from COVID. And, and it's getting shared around. And because people are, because it's, it's, you know, gripping and scary and maybe, you know, but if you think more and share less, you realize that what they actually must have meant there was when you can look up the stats and it turns out to be right, one of 20 Canadians who died, died of COVID. But it, which is very different than one in 20 Canadians died of COVID, right? And, and so it's, you know, so it's just one of these examples where you, you know, it's easy to see that. I think this is scary. Hey, I know this COVID thing is bad. There's an element of truth in it that people should be taking this more seriously. You share it. And we're just saying, like, slow down, like, think of it. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's, frankly, it's not even, it's even unclear whether that's intentional obfuscation, right? Yeah. I don't think so. I think it was, I think this particular case was just a mistake. Yeah. But, but who knows? So, look, I mean, I think another, this particular podcast, I mean, if one of the ways that you combat bullshit is kind of understanding what bullshitters are trying to do, then I think we've actually done a fairly good job of, you know, illustrating what bullshitters are trying to do here. I'm glad. I'm glad. It's a, I think we kept the bullshit density relatively low as well. I tried, at least I tried. I mean, you, people can read the book and decide for themselves. Yes. And, and you're right. Critical thinking is, you know, and doing your own thinking is significant and not advocating that responsibility. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, to me, the message is there's a lot more to know about the underpinnings of bullshit than one would think. And I think we could kind of scratch the surface. Normally I ask three questions, but we are massively over time. So, I'm not going to, I'm not going to ask that except for to just say, is there anything that I failed to cover that you're like, dude, we can't end here unless we say something about X. No, I think you did a great job. I think it was like, we got through what I wanted to talk about. So, thank you very much. Okay. Thanks for the opportunity to be on the show. So, in that sense, this is the end end. So, first thank you, but look, typically when people tell me that they are monumentally busy, I think that's bullshit. However, you're one of the few people I would believe when you say that. So, it really does mean a great deal to me that you give me some of your time. And I really want to thank you for that. Yeah. Thank you for your patience. It's certainly, it's certainly calm down now. I'm working 60 hours a week instead of the, it was for a month or two. It was 100 and then that wasn't sustainable and then it was 80 for a year and now it's finally, you know, the light, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, I appreciate it and I'm sure the tool too. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much to you. This has been Intangibles. You can find this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, and many other podcast platforms. You can also find it at its home on the web, which is www.intangiblespodcast.com. I'm Steve Bird. Thank you. Keep an eye out for the next episode.