The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit summary

When you buy something, you usually pay between 50 and 100 percent more than the wholesale price. That’s considered a reasonable markup for the risks the retailer takes.

But, in a restaurant, the wine often comes with a 400 percent markup. Many people know this and order a soda instead. Incidentally, this doesn’t make sense either – the markup on soda can be a staggering 1,000 percent!

Bullshit blindness, or what the author calls bullibility – a mashup of bullshit and gullibility – is something that affects us all. We accept bullshit as fact and fail to recognize that the bullshitter either disregards the truth or hasn’t even bothered to establish it. 

Bullibility is one reason why Ponzi schemes attract so many investors. These scams promise a quick return, but all profits really come from the payments made by people further down the chain. The scheme generates no real profit, so it’s doomed to fail. 

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt thought that bullshit occurs when we’re required to talk about something we’re not really familiar with. The author goes even further: his research shows that we bullshit whenever people ask us our opinions. How well-informed we are doesn’t even come into it. 

And we’re even more likely to bullshit when we talk to people who know less than we do. In the author’s research, 41 percent of participants used bullshit when talking to someone new to a subject; but only 29 percent bullshitted when talking to someone knowledgeable.

In 1989, Dr. Douglas Biklen introduced facilitated communication to the United States. It purported to give mute autistic patients a tool for communicating with others. The idea was, they’d use a typewriter and the assistance of a trained facilitator. 

It was considered a major breakthrough – that is, until skeptics examined the approach more closely.

You’ve almost certainly watched some TED Talks – and you’ve probably found them inspirational and educational. These “ideas worth spreading” usually start with a bio that presents the credentials of the speaker. Its job is to convince you that you’re dealing with an expert – somebody whom you can trust to deliver facts, not fiction.

In reality, though, a lot of these talks spread bullshit.

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

This well-known phrase is attributed to Abraham Lincoln. If he was right, then there should be plenty of people who aren’t fooled by bullshit. And indeed, the author believes, there are. 

Can you imagine a world without bullshit? A world where you don’t have to listen to people talking about things they know nothing about? A world where there are no more baseless arguments? A world based on evidence, reasoning, and rational decisions?

This world can exist. And building it is the responsibility of each and every one of us.