John V. Petrocelli

I find it hard to resist books with covers on the red/orange end of the color spectrum and also titles with swear words in them. Put the two together like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck or this book in hand, and I'm sure to read it.

Despite the catchy title and the amusingly frequent use of the word "bullshit" and several derivatives, I found the prose style to be a bit dry, academic, and dull. Petrocelli draws a distinction between bullshitters and liars and lays out some common sense methods for detecting them, but he sprinkles in a lot of complex concepts and jargon. He brings up some interesting examples -- Bernie Madoff and Ponzi schemes, Deepak Chopra and Donald Trump, TED Talks, wine and diamond marketing, car and real estate sales -- but doesn't really delve too deeply into any of them as he skims on to the next concept.

For readers who are critical thinkers, there is not much new here. Readers who are not critical thinkers will either be slightly lost at times or turned off by the bashing of what may be some of their favorite things to believe in or bullshit about. For instance, I don't think any anti-vaxxers will be converted by the evidence presented here.

I was annoyed by the inconsistent use of the "fly scale" Petrocelli introduces early in the book. Sometimes they rated a subject, other times they just seemed to serve as line breaks. Mostly, since I read outside while walking, they just kept making me think a bug had landed on the page.

Finally, I thought his conclusion that we should all model "calling bullshit" so it catches catches on and everyone starts telling the truth all the time to be simplistically pollyannish, but perhaps he was just serving up some ironic bullshit of his own.

Side note: I do find it odd that in a book about bullshit he changes the names of a couple people he features to protect their identities but buries that fact in the end notes instead of being upfront about it.… (altro)

Everybody recognizes bullshit when they hear it. Or assuming they’re paying attention, they at least think they do. But psychologist John Petrocelli has gone much farther and deeper into the doodoo. In The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, he has researched an exhaustive compendium of circumstances, stereotypes, job classes and ulterior motives that make life a minefield. BS is everywhere, all day long.

Petrocelli teaches bullshit detection and has a bs detection lab at Wake Forest University. Not the typical day job, but an endless one, as it seems one can never really get to the bottom of it all. Or even just away from it. Even Petrocelli himself is guilty of it.

First off, one needs to be able to tell the difference between bs and lies. “The liar does whatever he can to hide the truth – to do it successfully, the liar distorts his portrayal of reality and tries to remember the lie. The bullshitter doesn’t have these burdens because most often, he actually believes his own bullshit. Think of how much easier it would be if you didn’t have the burden of knowing the truth or remembering that something is false. It wouldn’t feel like lying at all.” And in addition to bs and lying, there is also simply being wrong. Good luck sorting them out.

Petrocelli spends a lot of seemingly joyful time calling out the bs of various hyper-wealthy celebrities. The pickins are easy here. Donald Trump, Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz come in for special treatment. They have made fortunes, based on nothing real. Trump makes most of his money licensing his name which he has built over decades of bs in the media. Chopra has indecipherable bafflegab concepts which mean absolutely nothing in the English language but which sound deep. Petrocelli says there is “little difference in the perceived profundity of Deepak tweets and artificial Deepak quotes generated by an algorithm.” Dr. Oz shills for all kinds of products and bogus treatments that can’t withstand the light of day, but millions will buy into them on his sayso. Petrocelli has studied him and says less than half are backed by medical science.

There are whole industries and careers that mandate bs. Petrocelli examines used car salesmen, jewelers, pharmaceutical reps and real estate agents, among others. Reading their strategies and tactics casts them in a whole new light. They are finely tuned into the dark art of bs.

In marketing, an industry built entirely on bs, experts can make claims that skirt the truth. They use tools like framing, he says. They could say a product contains 20% fat, but how much better to claim it is “NOW 80% fat-free!” The result is billions of dollars spent on terrible products.

The intersection of marketing and jewelry, Petrocelli says, is a pile of bs. Diamonds are not an “investment”. That is jeweler bullshit. Buyers will never make more when they sell later. The markup is so high that the wholesale price can never exceed the original retail price. Lab-made diamonds are the worst, with markups easily exceeding 1000%. He says buying a diamond at a pawnshop will get buyers the same quality on the genuine article, for a quarter of the price of something new. All the rest is bs.

There are whole industries that propagate bs, like TED Talks that are presented in their endless variety without vetting or challenge. To stand out, speakers must lay it on thick.

BS is so ingrained, he says, that “many of our memories, beliefs, attitudes and decisions are based on bullshit rather than evidence-based reasoning.” We have grown up believing the rock-solid truth of things that have no basis in fact. We insist our knowledge is unimpeachable, when we have no basis for making any claims at all. We also see it in internet facts, based on ungenuine photographs and made-up studies and headlines. But this is nothing new; it has been going on since people could talk. Any time someone wants to sell something to someone else, the bs rises to the top.

It is an unfortunate truth, but bs is instantly and permanently valued over truth. Petrocelli has quotes going back to the Ancient Greeks bemoaning the power of bs. My favorite comes from Jonathan Swift just 300 years ago: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.” We have only to look at Q-anon conspiracies, like Hillary Clinton running a child porn ring out the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria to see this in action. Sadly, people still believe it, despite the building having basement at all, and the pizzeria closing because of all the hassles.

Society is geared up for it. Vitamin products by law are not required to have studies behind their claims. Diets need not show any proof. Miracle cures only require belief to be valid. Such is the power of bs. It is also a feature of being a social animal. People know innately it is better to say anything at all rather than nothing, in order to maintain membership in a group. No participation leads to being ignored and forgotten. So people will say anything to keep the conversation going, with themselves in it, Petrocelli says.

So how do we protect ourselves? Unfortunately, it isn’t easy. Petrocelli provides endless lists of checkoffs that could clue us in to bs. He proposes all kinds of questions to ask that will shine a light on the bs spewing at us. Beware of explanations that begin with “There was a study that showed…” or “Some say that…” They mean the speaker is spreading the stuff. Social media claims – fugeddaboudit.

Beating it boils down to critical thinking, which many are simply not capable of. They might be too trusting, too inexperienced, too naïve, too lazy or uncaring. So bs thrives. It rises in groups where there is no expert to call it out. It rises when one in the group is known to have similar opinions. It rises to fill blank spaces in conversation. There are endless opportunities for bs in our daily lives.

Petrocelli is justifiably focused on his own field, psychology. He points to innumerable psych studies that are simply bogus and which float through the air of truth because no one will call the bs out, even, if not especially, their peer-reviewed journals. There are endless studies with faulty methodologies, whose conclusions become common knowledge around the world. And there are bogus health claims for innumerable products and services for which there may be no studies at all. They too become ingrained in society. Diets, skin creams and wellness fads all fit the bill.

To give one example, Petrocelli calls out a fasting guru for all the insane claims to health and wellbeing that intermittent fasting supposedly confers: “I feel I have the right to call bullshit on (Cynthia) Thurlow because the two hours I spent fact-checking her claims was probably more time than she spent seeking the truth about intermittent fasting,” he says. But she has leveraged a TED Talk into books and media appearances as if she has hit on an unknown secret of the ages. That there is simply no truth to it is apparently irrelevant.

Let me pause to say Petrocelli is not the most economical of writers. He seems to take forever to make a point, and his points are mostly so straightforward they need no coddling. He is codifying a bunch of miscellany we all know about already. The puffery around it, if I may, is bs. But what is news is that it is so pervasive, pernicious, and such a permanent fixture of human life that we need to beware of it every moment of the day. So readers must go on, exploring where else they never considered bs to be lying in wait.

And for all that, Petrocelli is just as capable of spreading bs himself. He uses the hoary tale of Stanley Milgram’s much publicized and iconic study in the early sixties, where he supposedly showed that people will bend to authority, no matter what they are asked to do. Petrocelli calls it being Bullible. If someone appears to be in charge, people will defer to that office. Or so he insists the study showed.

Milgram posted subjects at consoles where they had to zap a person with high voltage if they answered a question incorrectly. As the game progressed, the voltage got higher and higher - into killer territory. The monitors in lab coats urged them on, telling the subjects they “must continue” and that they “have no choice.” This study has been used to show how autocrats manipulate people, and how everyone defers to the supposed expert. Even Petrocelli says: “participants tended to obey the authority figure” of the man in white commanding them to torture their victim.

Sorry, but that’s bs. The truth is that well over half the subjects flat out refused to zap the responders when the voltage seemed to be too painful. They defied the men in labcoats and quit the study. Worse, half the remaining subjects, who continued zapping away, said they did it because they knew it was all bogus and no one was being zapped with anything at all. This means nearly 80% of the subjects either did not fall for the setup or walked out with a clear conscience. In other words, what everyone “knows” about the Milgram study, and have been saying is gospel truth for decades, is bs. Including our author.

So the whole premise of critical thinking and checklists to catch bs in the making, I’m afraid, is bs. If bs can catch this author, it can overcome anyone. Nonetheless, the book is definitely entertaining, educational, and helpful. But life is just too complicated for everyone to catch all the bs. That much is truth you can take to the bank.

David Wineberg… (altro)