Short presentation from the Workshop on Collective Behavior, Social Media, and Systemic Risk, Princeton University 8/17/2018.

1. Information Technology
and the Ubiquity of Bullshit
http://callingbullshit.org
@callin_bull
Carl T. Bergstrom with Jevin West

2. we are drowning in bullshit
CC-BY 2.0 Azlan Dupree

3. politicians are
unconstrained by facts
CC-BY-NC Matt JohnsonCC-BY-2.0 Alex Hanson

4. science is conducted
by press release
science is conducted by press
release
CC0 Pixabay

5. higher education rewards
bullshit over analytic thought
PD-US comedy_nose@flickr

6. startup culture elevates bullshit
to high art
CC0 Max Pixel

7. advertisers feed us
bullshit straight up.
CC-BY-NC 2.0 clotho98@flickr

8. administrative activity often amounts to a
sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial
reassembly of bullshit.
PD-USgov

9. the average American spends nearly an
hour a day on Facebook.
Doing what? Mostly spreading bullshit.
CC0 PEXELS

10. Our information environment is
insincere
and
unreliable
And everyone knows it.

11. http://callingbullshit.org

12. 1. Introduction to bullshit
2. Spotting bullshit
3. Causality
4. Statistical traps and trickery
5. Data Visualization
6. Big Data bullshit
7. Publication bias
8. Predatory publishing and scientific misconduct
9. Natural ecology of fake new and other bullshit
10. Refuting bullshit

15. Changing
information
technologies

16. The Major Transitions in
Evolution
John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry

17. Growth in…
Bergstrom and Dugatkin (2011), adapted from Payne et al (2009) PNAS,
Valentine et al (1994) Paleobiol.
Body size Morphological
complexity

18. What made this growth of
complexity possible?

19. acquire
process
store
transmit
Advances in information technology

20. 1. Replicating molecules to protocells
2. Independent genes to chromosomes
3. RNA to DNA
4. Bacterial cells to eukaryotic cells
5. Asexual to sexual reproduction
6. Single-celled to multicellular
7. Solitary to colonial living
8. Simple signals to combinatorial language
Advances in information technology

21. The form of information
influences what we say
and how it spreads.

22. What gets written down?
Who determines that?
Who gets it see it?

26. “Writing indeed, which
brings in gold for us,
should be respected and
held to be nobler than all
goods, unless she has
suffered degradation in
the brothel of the printing
presses.”
— Fillipo de Strata
1474

27. “The invention of new and various
kinds of communication has given a
voice and an audience to many
people whose opinions would
otherwise not be solicited, and who,
in fact, have little else but verbal
excrement to contribute to public
issues.”
— Neil Postman
1969

30. misinformation
the rise of

32. Fake news fooling the search engines
Search Credit: Dan Abrams

35. “
Jonathan Swift’s (1710)
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
Falsehood flies, and the
Truth comes limping after
it.”

36. What’s going on ?

37. Economic incentives

38. Hostile state actors

41. “The point of modern propaganda
isn't only to misinform or push an
agenda. It is to exhaust your
critical thinking, to annihilate
truth.”
—Garry Kasparov (2016)

42. CC-BY-2.0 Jon S (flickr)
Buzzfeed.com
Subscription-driven
Click-driven
The unvarnished truth
is no longer good enough.

43. Correlation doesn’t imply causation,
but it doesn’t sell newspapers either.
Of course, correlation
doesn’t equate to
causation, and other
factors could be
prompting millennial
women to delay or
forgoing children”
“

44. Social media sharing as social signaling.
Professor Judith Donath, MIT Media Lab

45. In the world of social media, of
Facebook and Twitter, news is
shared not just to inform or even to
persuade. It is used as a marker of
identity, a way to proclaim your
affinity with a particular community.
“
—Judith Donath, MIT Media Lab

46. Trump is LOL!!1!
Suppose you go on social media and say
CC-BY2.0 Marc Nozell (flickr)

47. Me?
What you are actually saying is
I am with
You.
CC-BY-2.0 David Geitgey Sierralupe flickr)

48. But for this purpose, it doesn’t matter
whether what I’m saying is even true.
HUGE coverup!
Secret FBI files
show Hillary had
Antonin Scalia
killed so she could
take our guns!
PD US

49. Me?
I don’t even care if you believe it.
The more implausible, the stronger the signal
I am with
You.
CC-BY-2.0 Michael Vadon (flickr)

50. Information is evaluated based not on
conformity to common standards of
evidence or correspondence to a common
understanding of the world, but on whether
it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is
vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our
side” and “true” begin to blur into one.”
“
—David Roberts, Vox
Tribal epistemology

51. “
Uriel Fanelli’s
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
An idiot can create more
bullshit than you could ever
hope to refute.”

52. “
Alberto Brandolini’s
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
The amount of energy
necessary to refute bullshit
is an order of magnitude
bigger than to produce it.”

54. http://callingbullshit.org
@callin_bull
Callin_bull
Bullsht.course@gmail.com