That's BS!

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As we watch many participants in today’s political debates–and the public’s reaction to them–it can be useful to consider the lessons set forth in this blog post and the article to which it refers,  “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”.

Key findings:

We focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.

The authors’ suggestion that a type of cognitive bias is at work is interesting. To whatever extent that is true, I would argue that society’s inclination to accept bullshit as true is also a function of our inadequate system of education. Many people simply don’t understand the basics of physics, biology, mathematics, and statistics.  Therefore, they have an insufficient level of BS detection.

Unfortunately, in health care this is a rampant problem in stories written by reporters about the latest diagnostic and therapeutic “advances.”  Indeed, our friends over at Health News Review make a living by demonstrating the inadequacies of media coverage in this field.

But back to politics, it is the disrespect for science that I find most troubling in the current environment.  Let’s acknowledge that scientific conclusions are often off the mark: That’s the nature of the scientific method and the long-term pursuit of knowledge. No, more dangerously, what we see is the political driven tactic of denigrating the role of science. When scientific illiteracy is promoted as a virtue, bad things happen in the body politic.