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CHAPTER 1

Bullshit Everywhere

T HIS IS A BOOK ABOUT bullshit. It is a book about how we are inundated with it, about how
we can learn to see through it, and about how we can fight back. First things first, though. We
would like to understand what bullshit is, where it comes from, and why so much of it is
produced. To answer these questions, it is helpful to look back into deep time at the origins of
the phenomenon.

Bullshit is not a modern invention. In one of his Socratic dialogues, Euthydemus, Plato
complains that the philosophers known as the Sophists are indifferent to what is actually true
and are interested only in winning arguments. In other words, they are bullshit artists. But if
we want to trace bullshit back to its origins, we have to look a lot further back than any human
civilization. Bullshit has its origins in deception more broadly, and animals have been
deceiving one another for hundreds of millions of years.

CHEATING CRUSTACEANS AND DEVIOUS RAVENS

T he oceans are full of fierce and wonderful creatures, but few are as badass as the marine
crustaceans known as the mantis shrimp or, in more technical circles, stomatopods. Some
specialize in eating marine snails, which are protected by hard, thick shells. To smash through
these calcite defenses, mantis shrimp have evolved a spring-loading mechanism in their
forelimbs that allows them to punch with enormous force. Their hammer-like claws travel 50
mph when they strike. The punch is so powerful that it creates an underwater phenomenon
known as cavitation bubbles, a sort of literal Batman “KAPOW!” that results in a loud noise
and a flash of light. In captivity they sometimes punch right through the glass walls of their
aquariums.

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This punching power serves another purpose. Mantis shrimp live on shallow reefs, where
they are vulnerable to moray eels, octopi, sharks, and other predators. To stay safe, they
spend much of their time holed up in cavities in the reef, with just their powerful foreclaws
exposed. But suitable cavities are in short supply, and this can lead to fights. When an
intruder approaches a smaller resident, the resident typically flees. But if the resident is big
enough, it waves its claws in a fierce display, demonstrating its size and challenging its
opponent.

Like any superhero, however, mantis shrimp have an Achilles’ heel. They have to molt in
to replace the hard casings of their hammer claws—which as you can imagine take more
than their share of abuse. During the two or three days that the animal is molting, it is
extremely vulnerable. It can’t punch, and it lacks the hard shell that normally defends it
against predators. Pretty much everything on the reef eats everything else, and mantis shrimp
are essentially lobster tails with claws on the front.

So if you’re a molting mantis shrimp holed up in a discreet crevice, the last thing you want
to do is flee and expose yourself to the surrounding dangers. This is where the deception
comes in. Normally, big mantis shrimp wave their claws—an honest threat—and small mantis
shrimp flee. But during molting, mantis shrimp of any size perform the threat display, even
though in their current state they can’t punch any harder than an angry gummy bear. The
threat is completely empty—but the danger of leaving one’s hole is even greater than the risk
of getting into a fight. Intruders, aware that they’re facing the mantis shrimp’s fierce punch,
are reluctant to call the bluff.

Stomatopods may be good bluffers, and bluffing does feel rather like a kind of bullshit—
but it’s not very sophisticated bullshit. For one thing, this behavior isn’t something that these
creatures think up and decide to carry out. It is merely an evolved response, a sort of instinct
or reflex.

A sophisticated bullshitter needs a theory of mind—she needs to be able to put herself in
the place of her mark. She needs to be able to think about what the others around her do and
do not know. She needs to be able to imagine what impression will be created by what sort of
bullshit, and to choose her bullshit accordingly.

Such advanced cognition is rare in the animal kingdom. We have it. Our closest primate
relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, may have it as well. Other apes and monkeys do not seem

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to have this capacity. But one very different family does: Corvidae.

We know that corvids—ravens, crows, and jays—are remarkably intelligent birds. They
manufacture the most sophisticated tools of any nonhuman species. They manipulate objects
in their environment to solve all manners of puzzle. The Aesop’s fable about the crow putting
pebbles into an urn to raise the water level is probably based on a real observation; captive
crows can figure out how to do this sort of thing. Ravens plan ahead for the future, selecting
objects that may be useful to them later. Crows recognize human faces and hold grudges
against those who have threatened or mistreated them. They even pass these grudges along to
their fellow crows.

We don’t know exactly why corvids are so smart, but their lifestyle does reward
intelligence. They live a long time, they are highly social, and they creatively explore their
surroundings for anything that might be edible. Ravens in particular may have evolved
alongside pack-hunting species such as wolves and ourselves, and are excellent at tricking
mammals out of their food.

Because food is sometimes plentiful and other times scarce, most corvid species cache
their food, storing it in a safe place where it can be recovered later. But caching is a losing
proposition if others are watching. If one bird sees another cache a piece of food, the observer
often steals it. As a result, corvids are cautious about caching their food in view of other birds.
When being watched, ravens cache quickly, or move out of sight before hiding their food.
They also “fake-cache,” pretending to stash a food item but actually keeping it safely in their
beak or crop to be properly cached at a later time.

So when a raven pretends to cache a snack but is actually just faking, does that qualify as
bullshitting? In our view, this depends on why the raven is faking and whether it thinks about
the impression its fakery will create in the mind of an onlooker. Full-on bullshit is intended to
distract, confuse, or mislead—which means that the bullshitter needs to have a mental model
of the effect that his actions have on an observer’s mind. Do corvids have a theory of mind?
Do they understand that other birds can see them caching and are likely to steal from them?
Or do they merely follow some simple rule of thumb—such as “cache only when no other
ravens are around”—without knowing why they are doing so? Researchers who study animal
behavior have been hard-pressed to demonstrate that any nonhuman animals have a theory
of mind. But recent studies suggest that ravens may be an exception. When caching treats,
they do think about what other ravens know. And not only do ravens act to deceive other birds
sitting right there in front of them; they recognize that there might be other birds out there,
unseen, who can be deceived as well.*1 That is pretty close to what we do when we bullshit on
the Internet. We don’t see anyone out there, but we hope and expect that our words will reach
an audience.

Ravens are tricky creatures, but we humans take bullshit to the next level. Like ravens, we
have a theory of mind. We can think in advance about how others will interpret our actions,
and we use this skill to our advantage. Unlike ravens, we also have a rich system of language
to deploy. Human language is immensely expressive, in the sense that we can combine words
in a vast number of ways to convey different ideas. Together, language and theory of mind
allow us to convey a broad range of messages and to model in our own minds what effects our
messages will have on those who hear them. This is a good skill to have when trying to
communicate efficiently—and it’s equally useful when using communication to manipulate
another person’s beliefs or actions.

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That’s the thing about communication. It’s a two-edged sword. By communicating we can
work together in remarkable ways. But by paying attention to communication, you are giving
other people a “handle” they can use to manipulate your behavior. Animals with limited
communication systems—a few different alarm calls, say—have just a few handles with which
they can be manipulated. Capuchin monkeys warn one another with alarm calls. On average
this saves a lot of capuchin lives. But it also allows lower-ranking monkeys to scare dominant
individuals away from precious food: All they have to do is send a deceptive alarm call in the
absence of danger. Still, there aren’t all that many things capuchins can say, so there aren’t all
that many ways they can deceive one another. A capuchin monkey can tell me to flee, even if
doing so is not in my best interest. But it can’t, say, convince me that it totally has a girlfriend
in Canada; I’ve just never met her. Never mind getting me to transfer $10,000 into a bank
account belonging to the widow of a mining tycoon, who just happened to ask out of the blue
for my help laundering her fortune into US currency.

So why is there bullshit everywhere? Part of the answer is that everyone, crustacean or
raven or fellow human being, is trying to sell you something. Another part is that humans
possess the cognitive tools to figure out what kinds of bullshit will be effective. A third part is
that our complex language allows us to produce an infinite variety of bullshit.

WEASEL WORDS AND LAWYER LANGUAGE

W e impose strong social sanctions on liars. If you get caught in a serious lie, you may lose a
friend. You may get punched in the nose. You may get sued in a court of law. Perhaps worst of
all, your duplicity may become the subject of gossip among your friends and acquaintances.
You may find yourself no longer a trusted partner in friendship, love, or business.

With all of these potential penalties, it’s often better to mislead without lying outright.
This is called paltering. If I deliberately lead you to draw the wrong conclusions by saying
things that are technically not untrue, I am paltering. Perhaps the classic example in recent
history is Bill Clinton’s famous claim to Jim Lehrer on Newshour that “there is no sexual
relationship [with Monica Lewinsky].” When further details came to light, Clinton’s defense
was that his statement was true: He used the present-tense verb “is,” indicating no ongoing
relationship. Sure, there had been one, but his original statement hadn’t addressed that issue
one way or the other.

Paltering offers a level of plausible deniability—or at least deniability. Getting caught
paltering can hurt your reputation, but most people consider it less severe an offense than
outright lying. Usually when we get caught paltering, we are not forced to say anything as
absurdly lawyerly as Bill Clinton’s “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

Paltering is possible because of the way that we use language. A large fraction of the time,
what people are literally saying is not what they intend to communicate. Suppose you ask me
what I thought of David Lynch’s twenty-fifth-anniversary Twin Peaks reboot, and I say, “It
wasn’t terrible.” You would naturally interpret that to mean “It wasn’t very good either”—even
though I haven’t said that. Or suppose when talking about a colleague’s recreational habits I
say, “John doesn’t shoot up when he is working.” Interpreted literally, this means only that
John doesn’t do heroin when he is working and gives you no reason to suspect that John uses
the drug after hours either. But what this sentence implies is very different. It implies that
John is a heroin user with a modicum of restraint.

Within linguistics, this notion of implied meaning falls under the area of pragmatics.
Philosopher of language H. P. Grice coined the term implicature to describe what a sentence
is being used to mean, rather than what it means literally. Implicature allows us to
communicate efficiently. If you ask where you can get a cup of coffee and I say, “There’s a

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diner just down the block,” you interpret my response as an answer to your question. You
assume that the diner is open, that it serves coffee, and so forth. I don’t have to say all of that
explicitly.

But implicature is also what lets us palter. The implicature of the claim “John doesn’t
shoot up when working” is that he does shoot up at other times. Otherwise, why wouldn’t I
have just said that John doesn’t shoot drugs, period?

Implicature provides a huge amount of wiggle room for people to say misleading things
and then claim innocence afterward. Imagine that John tried to take me to court for
slandering him by my saying he doesn’t shoot up at work. How could he possibly win? My
sentence is true, and he has no interest in claiming otherwise. People all too often use this gulf
between literal meaning and implicature to bullshit. “He’s not the most responsible father I’ve
ever known,” I say. It’s true, because I know one dad who is even better—but you think I mean
that he’s a terrible father. “He will pay his debts if you prod him enough.” It’s true, because
he’s an upright guy who quickly pays his debts without prompting, but you think I mean that
he’s a cheapskate. “I got a college scholarship and played football.” It’s true, though my
scholarship was from the National Merit society and I played touch football with my buddies
on Sunday mornings. Yet you think I was a star college athlete.

An important genre of bullshit known as weasel wording uses the gap between literal
meaning and implicature to avoid taking responsibility for things. This seems to be an
important skill in many professional domains. Advertisers use weasel words to suggest
benefits without having to deliver on their promises. If you claim your toothpaste reduces
plaque “by up to” 50 percent, the only way that would be false is if the toothpaste worked too
well. A politician can avoid slander litigation if he hedges: “People are saying” that his
opponent has ties to organized crime. With the classic “mistakes were made,” a manager goes
through the motions of apology without holding anyone culpable.

Homer Simpson understood. Defending his son, Bart, he famously implored “Marge, don’t
discourage the boy. Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from
the animals….Except the weasel.”

Homer’s joking aside, corporate weaselspeak diffuses responsibility behind a smoke
screen of euphemism and passive voice. A 2019 NBC News report revealed that many global
manufacturers were likely using materials produced by child labor in Madagascar. A
spokesperson for Fiat Chrysler had this to say: Their company “engages in collaborative
action with global stakeholders across industries and along the value chain to promote and
develop our raw material supply chain.” Collaborative action? Global stakeholders? Value
chain? We are talking about four-year-olds processing mica extracted from crude mines.
Entire families are working in the blazing sun and sleeping outside all night for forty cents a
day. This is bullshit that hides a horrible human toll behind the verbiage of corporate lingo.

Some bullshitters actively seek to deceive, to lead the listener away from truth. Other
bullshitters are essentially indifferent to the truth. To explain, let’s return from weasels back
to the animal-signaling stories with which we began this chapter. When animals
communicate, they typically send self-regarding signals. Self-regarding signals refer to the
signaler itself rather than to something in the external world. For example, “I’m hungry,” “I’m
angry,” “I’m sexy,” “I’m poisonous,” and “I’m a member of the group” are all self-regarding
signals because they convey something about the signaler.

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Other-regarding signals refer to elements of the world beyond the signaler itself. Such
signals are uncommon among animal signals, with the notable exception of alarm calls. Most
nonhuman animals simply don’t have ways to refer to external objects. Humans are different.
One of the novel or nearly novel features of human language is that human language gives us
the vocabulary and grammar to talk about not only ourselves but also other people and other
external objects in the world.

But even when humans are ostensibly communicating about elements of the external
world, they may be saying more about themselves than it seems. Think about meeting
someone for the first time at a party or other social event and falling into conversation. Why
do you tell the stories that you do? Why do you talk at all, for that matter? Your stories don’t
just inform the other person about aspects of the world. They convey things about who you
are—or at least about whom you want to be. Maybe you’re trying to come off as brave and
adventurous. Or maybe sensitive and troubled. Maybe you’re iconoclastic. Maybe you’re a
master of self-deprecating humor. We tell stories to create impressions of ourselves in the
eyes of others.

This impulse drives a lot of bullshit production. When you’re talking about a crazy
adventure you had on a backpacking trip through Asia, your story doesn’t actually need to be
true to create the impression you are seeking. You often don’t care one way or the other. Your
story just needs to be interesting, impressive, or engaging. One need only to sit around with
friends and a shared pitcher of beer to see this firsthand. This kind of bullshit has become an
art form in the so-called attention economy. Think about the stories that go viral on social
media: funny things that kids say, horrible first dates, trouble that pets get into. These may or
may not be true, and to most people who read them, it doesn’t matter.

Just because people can spew bullshit doesn’t mean that they will, nor does it mean that
bullshit will not be quickly eradicated by the force of truth. So why is bullshit ubiquitous?

FALSEHOOD FLIES AND THE TRUTH COMES LIMPING AFTER

P erhaps the most important principle in bullshit studies is Brandolini’s principle. Coined by
Italian software engineer Alberto Brandolini in 2014, it states:

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an of magnitude bigger than [that
needed] to produce it.”

Producing bullshit is a lot less work than cleaning it up. It is also a lot simpler and cheaper
to do. A few years before Brandolini formulated his principle, Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli had
already noted that, loosely translated, “an idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever
hope to refute.” Conspiracy theorist and radio personality Alex Jones need not be an evil
genius to spread venomous nonsense such as his Sandy Hook denialism and Pizzagate stories;
he could be an evil idiot—or even a misguided one.

Within the field of medicine, Brandolini’s principle is exemplified by the pernicious
falsehood that vaccines cause autism. After more than twenty years of research, there is no
evidence that vaccines cause autism; indeed there is overwhelming evidence that they do not.
Yet misinformation about vaccines persists, due in large part to a shockingly poor 1998 study
published in The Lancet by British physician Andrew Wakefield and colleagues. In that
article, and in numerous subsequent press conferences, Wakefield’s research team raised the
possibility that a syndrome involving autism paired with inflammatory bowel disease may be
associated with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.*2

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Wakefield’s paper galvanized the contemporary “antivax” movement, created a
remarkably enduring fear of vaccines, and contributed to the resurgence of measles around
the world. Yet seldom in the history of science has a study been so thoroughly discredited.
Millions of dollars and countless research hours have been devoted to checking and
rechecking this study. It has been utterly and incontrovertibly discredited.*3

As the evidence against the MMR-autism hypothesis piled up and as Wakefield’s conflicts
of interest came to light, most of Wakefield’s co-authors started to lose faith in their study. In
2004, ten of them formally retracted the “interpretations” section of the 1998 paper.
Wakefield did not sign on to the retraction. In 2010, the paper was fully retracted by The
Lancet.

The same year, Wakefield was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by Britain’s
General Medical Council. He was admonished for his transgressions surrounding the 1998
paper, for subjecting his patients to unnecessary and invasive medical procedures including
colonoscopy and lumbar puncture, and for failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest.*4

As a result of this hearing, Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in the UK was revoked. In
2011, British Medical Journal editor in chief Fiona Godlee formally declared the original
study to be a fraud, and argued that there must have been intent to deceive; mere
incompetence could not explain the numerous issues surrounding the paper.

These ethical transgressions are not the strongest evidence against Wakefield’s claim of an
autism-vaccine link. Wakefield’s evidence may have been insufficient to justify his
conclusions. His handling of the data may have been sloppy or worse. His failure to follow the
ethics of his profession may have been egregious. The whole research paper may have indeed
been an “elaborate fraud” rife with conflicts of interest and fabricated findings. In principle
Wakefield’s claim could still have been correct. But he is not correct. We know this because of
the careful scientific studies carried out on a massive scale. It is not the weaknesses in
Wakefield’s paper that prove there is no autism-vaccine link: it is the overwhelming weight of
subsequent scientific evidence.

To be clear, there was nothing inappropriate about looking to see if there is a connection
between autism and vaccination. The problem is that the original study was done
irresponsibly at best—and that when its frightening conclusions were definitively disproven,
antivaxxers invented a story about a Big Pharma conspiracy to hide the truth. Wakefield
eventually directed a documentary titled Vaxxed, which alleged that the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) was covering up safety problems surrounding vaccines. The
film received a large amount of press attention and reinvigorated the vaccine scare. Despite
all the findings against Wakefield and the crushing avalanche of evidence against his
hypothesis, Wakefield retains credibility with a segment of the public and unfounded fears
about a vaccine-autism link persist.

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TWO DECADES LATER, WAKEFIELD’S hoax has had disastrous public health consequences.

Vaccine rates have risen from their nadir shortly after Wakefield’s paper was published, but
remain dangerously lower than they were in the early 1990s. In the first six months of 2018,
Europe reported a record high 41,000 measles cases. The US, which had nearly eliminated
measles entirely, now suffers large outbreaks on an annual basis. Other diseases such as
mumps and whooping cough (pertussis) are making a comeback. Particularly in affluent
coastal cities, many Americans are skeptical that vaccines are safe. One recent trend is for
parents to experiment with delayed vaccination schedules. This strategy has no scientific
support and leaves children susceptible for a prolonged period to the ravages of childhood
diseases. Children with compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable. Many of
them cannot be vaccinated, and rely for their safety on the “herd immunity” that arises when
those around them are vaccinated.

So here we have a hypothesis that has been as thoroughly discredited as anything in the
scientific literature. It causes serious harm to public health. And yet it will not go away. Why
has it been so hard to debunk the rumors of a connection between vaccines and autism? This
is Brandolini’s principle at work. Researchers have to invest vastly more time to debunk
Wakefield’s arguments than he did to produce them in the first place.

This particular misconception has a number of characteristics that make it more
persistent than many false beliefs. Autism is terrifying to parents, and as yet we do not know
what causes it. Like the most successful urban legends, the basic narrative is simple and
gripping: “A child’s vulnerable body is pierced with a needle and injected with a foreign
substance. The child seems perfectly fine for a few days or even weeks, and then suddenly
undergoes severe and often irreversible behavioral regression.” This story taps into some of
our deepest fears—in this case, fears about hygiene and contamination, and anxiety about the
health and safety of our children. The story caters to our desire for explanations, and to our
tendency to ascribe cause when we see two events occurring in succession. And it hints at a
way we might protect ourselves. Successfully refuting something like this is a decidedly uphill
battle.

Bullshit is not only easy to create, it’s easy to spread. Satirist Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710
that “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”*5 This saying has many different
incarnations, but our favorite is from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull:
“A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.”
We envision hapless Truth half-running and half-tripping down the hallway, struggling to pull
its pants up from around its ankles, in hopeless pursuit of a long-departed Lie.

Taken together, Brandolini’s principle, Fanelli’s principle, and Swift’s observation tell us
that (1) bullshit takes less work to create than to clean up, (2) takes less intelligence to create
than to clean up, and (3) spreads faster than efforts to clean it up. Of course, they are just
aphorisms. They sound good, and they feel “truthy,” but they could be just more bullshit. In
to measure bullshit’s spread, we need an environment where bullshit is captured,
stored, and packaged for large-scale analysis. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media
platforms provide such environments. Many of the messages sent on these platforms are
rumors being passed from one person to the next. Rumors are not exactly the same as
bullshit, but both can be products of intentional deception.

Retracing the path of a rumor’s spread is largely a matter of looking at who shared what
with whom and in what , all information that is readily available given adequate access
to the system. Tweets about crises are particularly consequential. The concentration of
attention during these events creates both the incentive to generate misinformation, and a
vital need to refute it.

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