Calling Bullshit

Given the nature of our modern information ecosystem, everyone who owns a phone or uses any device that's connected to the internet (or reads a newspaper or watches TV) should read this book.

It lays out, in amusing layman's terms, a variety of ways that people can try to bullshit us. It's not a technical book. It reads easily, with accessible and humorous examples sprinkled throughout, and it provides practical knowledge for surviving in this world we've created.

I celebrate any a book focusing on scientific literacy and I congratulate the authors on trying to reach an important audience: people who already (try to) think critically but could use some guidance on methods and pitfalls.

The book style is not for me, though. Like other generic best sellers on the 10's and 20's, it uses a random swear word to refer to things that have proper descriptors used by specialists who are serious about this field. It abuses the elasticity of slang to lump together things that are tangential and makes the book longer than it should. Sometimes I started getting semantic satiation from all the bullshit jokes and metaphors going around.

The very end of the book reminds the reader: the book is about calling out "bullshit", not just identifying it. But the majority of the book feels like a textbook that defines exhaustively all the modern types of "bullshit" through examples. This was a bit disappointing because like any anecdotal exposition, the majority of it is bound to be forgotten very quickly and the reader is left with very little in terms of long term behavioral changes.

If the book is about preparing readers to engage on questionable information, I think the book betrays the promise by investing so much on categorizing and exemplifying and so little in coaching the readers to do that by themselves. But of course if the point was to tell people to rely on fact checking agencies and reverse search images, there would be no book to write.

I do highly recommend the companion website (www.callingbullshit.org/) as an evergreen resource, specially the Tools and Case Studies sections.