Bad Advice: How to Survive and Thrive in an Age of Bullshit

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For years, Coach EO has been amassing followers through his YouTube channel, teaching those how to live life more abundantly. Unfortunately, disinformation and – frankly – lies are widely propagated and with the same magnitude as verified evidence. V’s signaturecombination of humor, hard science, and heart make Bad Advice an iconoclastic coursecorrectionlike no other. He told my mother and me how the psychiatrist kept slamming on the brakes and stopping the car dead. Does delayed gratification cause success (famous marshmallow trial) or does having rich parents correlate with a child being able to withstand not eating a marshmallow when it's in front of their face?

Also note that I read the hardback edition, which (weirdly) is not listed on goodreads, NOT THE KINDLE VERSION.

V’s signature combination of humor, hard science, and heart make Bad Advice an iconoclastic course-correction like no other. This book, a distillation of that course, presents a mix of amusing anecdotes, timely news stories and accessible explanations of scientific and medical data. I found particularly fascinating the sections about deceptive graphs and stats because that stuff can be tricky. But more importantly, the authors have done a superb job of breaking down concepts into accessible content for everyone.

This is of course one of the best known and finest lines in English literature, although it is written not by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom the authors of this book attribute the quote, but rather by Gregory Rabassa. And although mistakes do inevitably creep in during the writing and editing process, I was surprised that the letter M in the commonly used acronym, STEM, was erroneously attributed to medicine, instead of mathematics. g. reading just the last 2 pages) or a podcast/TED Talk would likely give as much value as the 300-page book.I have spent countless hours scrolling through the internet, determined to find the perfect self help book. Is it any wonder that a paper claiming to recognize criminality from a picture would produce nothing but utter bullshit if the input data was headshots of non-criminals and MUGSHOTS of convicted criminals? Last year an investigation on Irish television probed clinics in Istanbul that were claiming huge successes with unconventional therapies. It was good to see mention of mathiness, which Paul Romer has used in the context of much economic analysis (see e.

Read this as a refresher against the tsunami of crap blasting into our faces on a daily basis, and give yourself a chance not to be taken in. This book teaches us how to identify the various forms of new-school bullshit: how to evaluate scientific claims, to distinguish between correlation and causation, to recognize biased and unrepresentative data and small sample sizes, to identify selection biases in samples, to understand how data can be manipulated visually, and more.So unless you have no street smarts and really have no idea how to function in life, don't waste your time.

Not just because you might not choose the right statistical function, but rather because you probably are never going to be given the actual data anyway, just the conclusion. It's not just that I had hand sanitizer, toilet paper and was ready to shelter at home: at a time when the lockdown hadn't yet begun and we had no testing and therefore didn't know the local numbers in our region, his scientific posts along with those of the colleagues he elevated like STAT News reporter Helen Branswell and Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch may have saved lives in my circle in particular, and certainly saved that of others in the wider world. There’s a fascinating story there to be told — was the confidence (and its disappearance) a product of how well he was doing or wasn’t, or the other way around? Register a free business accountHardcover: 240 pages Publisher: HarperOne (November 6, 2018) Language: English ISBN-10: 0062570358ISBN-13: 978-0062570352 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.It mostly focuses on the bullshit that is presented in the form of information or anything that we tend to consume to act upon or make decisions.