Bad Advice: How to Survive and Thrive in an Age of Bullshit

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Misinformation, disinformation and the manipulation of information seem more pervasive since, and I could claim a causal relationship, but would I be correct? These guys have had a live audience to practice on so they are particularly clear, straightforward, and spot on.

The possibility that people are accurately judging their own health status is occasionally raised but then dismissed. Robertson illustrates the idea with stories of CEOs and sportspeople and so on who have, as he says, this can happen/can do attitude, and how they therefore changed the world.

Read this as a refresher against the tsunami of crap blasting into our faces on a daily basis, and give yourself a chance not to be taken in. Studies have shown,” he says, right at the start of the book, “that you will live longer after heart failure if your partner feels confident about your condition.

Since it’s easier to create bullshit than to refute it, simply refuting each new instance of bullshit seems like a losing battle. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote instead "Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. If Unherd starts having a golf column, I do not think employing Tom as the golf correspondent would be advisable. It's definitely a very interesting summary of the topic although, as mentioned, I didn't find much new here, there were definitely some new insights and a helpful overall framework. Full of useful examples, ways of tackling it (including 'get off the internet'), and memorable quotes.This would have been the interesting book Robertson could have written: the book teasing out the difference between confidence-as-assessment-of-skill and confidence-as-motivation. We do misjudge our own abilities, either overestimating or underestimating them, and it does feel from the inside as though confidence drives success as well as success driving confidence. After all, I recommend 'Bad Advice' to people who aim to survive and thrive in this age of bullshit! And, the chief take-away from the book is this: "If a story sounds too good--or too bad to be true--it probably is!

But having lost her mother to breast cancer, “fear left me more vulnerable to pseudoscience than I would care to admit”, she says. One particularly valuable section focus on the issues with the p-value used in many scientific papers, for example how, while this can (with certain biases) answer a question about the probability that the null hypothesis is true, a failure of the null hypothesis is then often used to confirm one particular alternative hypothesis, which is a different question altogether. I found particularly fascinating the sections about deceptive graphs and stats because that stuff can be tricky. We all need less bullshit to wade through, especially those of us who are reading while walking and might be more vulnerable by dint of just not paying attention. So if experts say the Earth is flat, or opioids aren't addictive, then it's safe to agree with either consensus opinion, but dangerous to challenge it.Claiming the average over the median is also an enormous source of bullshit, like how claiming a tax plan will reduce "average" American taxes (when it increases median taxes and benefits the wealthy).