Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

Two University of Washington professors — a computational biologist and a data scientist — built one of the most popular university courses in America on a single premise: that bullshit has become the defining pollutant of the information age, and that the tools to identify it are learnable. The book that emerged from that course is a rigorous, witty, and practically useful guide to recognising misleading statistics, manipulative data visualisations, motivated reasoning, and the specific forms of epistemic pollution that circulate in scientific, journalistic, and political discourse.

What distinguishes Calling Bullshit from adjacent popular-science accounts is its methodological precision. Bergstrom and West are not writing about fake news in the loose sense; they are writing about the structural conditions — the incentives, the cognitive biases, the platform dynamics — that make misinformation sticky and credible. For practitioners advising clients on organisational resilience, this book provides some of the most transferable tools available: concrete techniques for evaluating claims, interrogating data, and teaching others to do the same. An essential addition to any counter-disinformation reading list, and one of the most practically useful books in the field.