3. ON WEASEL WORDS
There are patterns in the way that bullshitters argue. Just as politicians tend to use “spin”—rhetorical tricks to make the situation sound better than it really is—so do the folks who are intent on bullshitting you.
Some of these bullshitters are really out-and-out liars trying to bamboozle you. Like the politician spinning the situation, they know the truth and they’re trying to make sure you don’t learn it, or at least that you only learn the version of it that they endorse. However, even those purveyors of bullshit who sincerely believe in what they’re telling you use the same patterns of rhetoric as the out-and-out liars. Perhaps they’re so convinced of their own version of the truth that they think winning the argument, by fair means or foul, is all that’s important. Perhaps they really don’t recognize the difference between a logical argument and an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes. Or perhaps they themselves have been deceived by those same rhetorical tricks and don’t even realize they’re using them.
QUOTE MINING AND CHERRY PICKING
How often have you watched a movie because of the glowing reviews the distributor has quoted, only to find out halfway through the movie that it totally sucks? You know the kind of review quotes I mean:
EDGE-OF-YOUR-SEAT EXCITEMENT!
or
TEARS . . . RAN FREELY DOWN MY FACE AS
I WATCHED THIS . . . TRAGIC LOVE STORY!
How would you feel if you tracked down the original reviews and discovered what the reviewers really said was:
With these stars and this budget you’d expect edge-of-your-seat excitement. What a pity that the result’s so unremittingly dire . . .
and
Tears of laughter ran freely down my face as I watched this supposedly tragic love story.
Movie distributors aren’t usually quite so blatant as this in their extraction of favorable quotes, but very often you’ll find that a review wasn’t quite the rave that the extract made it seem. The technique of selective quotation is called quote mining. A very famous example of quote mining comes from the Creationist crowd, who make heavy use of the following quote from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859):
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Here, the Creationists cry, we find the very Father of Evolution himself saying that natural selection couldn’t produce the human eye! What they neglect to mention is that Darwin went on to say that though it might be hard for us to imagine the eye emerging through natural selection, just a few moments’ thought shows us that it’s not as implausible as we might have first believed. Using only the opening part of Darwin’s quote implies that he meant something completely different from what he really did.1
A striking example of quote mining on a massive scale occurred in 2009 in the so-called Climategate affair. The main server of the UK’s University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (one of the world’s most important centers for studying climate) was hacked, and thousands of confidential emails that the Unit’s researchers had sent to one another were leaked to climate change-denialist websites and journalists . . . who began quote mining them.
Much was made, for example, of the use by Dr. Phil Jones, the unit’s chief, of the word “trick” to describe a particular means of presenting statistical information. Surely the word “trick” implies deceit, right?
Well, no, actually. Can you remember when you learned the trick of riding a bicycle without falling off?
No fewer than eight independent investigations of the Climate Research Unit have found there was no misconduct among its scientists, yet still the mined quotes keep being publicized by climate change denialists.
Similar to quote mining is cherry picking, which usually deals with data rather than words. For example, when you’re sharing your grades with your parents, it’s natural to focus on the As first, then the Bs . . . and maybe leave the F in Math until last. If you didn’t mention the F at all, and perhaps also failed to bring up that D in Physics, you’d be guilty of cherry picking.
Cherry picking data is a tactic used throughout the bullshitosphere, but perhaps most recognizably by climate change denialists. Graphs of rising atmospheric temperatures don’t show a straight line or a nice steady curve; they show a sort of zigzag. The general trend of the zigzag is inexorably upward, but it’s easy to find an individual point on the zigzag today that’s lower than a point ten years ago. Climate change denialists frequently use exactly this method of cherry picking to claim that the world isn’t warming, but is actually cooling down!
Sometimes the cherry picking doesn’t involve data but other kinds of evidence. It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into, even if you’re not a bullshitter yourself. We tend to focus on the evidence that supports our beliefs and pay less attention to the evidence that might make us question them. The true bullshitter will ignore the evidence in the latter category or, using one of the tactics described in this chapter, will try to discredit it.
STRAW MEN AND AD HOMINEM ATTACKS
Once upon a time some friends of mine were stuck in a line of cars in the Lincoln Tunnel, which links New York City to New Jersey. They got into an argument with the people in another car about who had the right of way. The occupants of both cars opened their windows and started hollering at each other. Finally, my friend Nancy yelled at one of the women in the other car, “And you look stupid in that hat!”
I wasn’t there, so I have no idea whether or not the woman did look stupid in that hat, but it’s pretty obvious that it had nothing to do with whether one car or the other had the right of way. Even so, the remark won the argument.
This incident is a classic example of an ad hominem attack. The Latin phrase ad hominem means “against the man,” meaning that the attack ignores the right or wrong of the argument and instead focuses on an irrelevant supposed failing of the opponent.
In 2009, the climate change denialist Christopher Monckton gave a talk at Bethel University in Minnesota. John Abraham, a professor in Thermal Sciences at the nearby University of St. Thomas, recorded Monckton’s lecture and went through it point by point, checking each and every reference Monckton had made to scientific sources, even contacting some of the researchers referenced to make sure he understood their conclusions correctly. Alarmingly, he found that in every instance what Monckton stated the source said differed from what it actually did say. In May 2010, Abraham published the results online as an eighty-four-minute audiovisual presentation entitled, “A Scientist Replies to Christopher Monckton,” in which he demolished every single one of the “scientific” claims Monckton had made in the lecture.
Monckton was not amused. In one attack he made on Abraham he said:
. . . so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face—he looks like an over-cooked prawn). . .
So here’s a challenge for you! Which one of these two was guilty of an ad hominem attack?
(a) Abraham, for checking Monckton’s claims and finding them false, or
(b) Monckton, for saying that “at least we are spared his face—he looks like an overcooked prawn”?
A straw man argument, very often used in politics, is where a person mounts an attack not on an opponent’s real beliefs or claims, but on a false version of them. (Quote mining is frequently used in the service of straw man arguments.) For example, if I wanted to mount a straw man attack on Charles Darwin I might say he believed the eye couldn’t develop through natural selection and use the mined quote given above as my evidence. Or I could say that his book Origin of Species was advancing a racist cause—after all, it even uses the word “races” in its subtitle. In fact, Origin of Species deals with evolution in animals and plants, not human beings, and Darwin was using the word “race” in its old sense, meaning “subspecies”! What I’d be doing, then, would be attacking him for a “crime” that I myself had invented . . . but many people wouldn’t realize that.
A variant on the straw man argument is false equivalence. A classic false equivalence might be:
• I’m frightened of getting suspended.
• Therefore, I’m frightened of the principal, who could suspend me.
• I’m also frightened of poisonous spiders.
• Therefore, the principal is a poisonous spider.
Depending on the particular principal, this could of course be sort of true! But it’s not a logical deduction.
THE GALILEO GAMBIT
“They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Albert Einstein, they laughed at Alfred Wegener . . .”
The implication is, of course, that, if someone is doubting or laughing at your ideas, they’re just showing how right you are, since you’re in such good company. The logical fallacy of the Galileo Gambit is pretty obvious—after all, they also laughed at Bugs Bunny.
A variation on the Galileo Gambit is the Gandhi Gambit. Here’s something Gandhi is supposed to have said as part of his advocacy of civil disobedience rather than violence as a means of revolution:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you . . . then you win.
There’s no reliable record of Gandhi ever actually saying this, but it’s a good quote anyway. Unfortunately, it’s been purloined by bullshitters for use in much the same way as the Galileo Gambit. No matter what your opponent is doing—laughing at you, arguing with you, or just plain ignoring you—this is supposedly merely a stage they’re going through on their way to agreeing with you.
THE GISH GALLOP
The creationist Duane Gish developed a style of debate that came to be called the Gish Gallop. Gish would insist his opponent go first. After his opponent was finished with his or her argument, Gish would begin talking very quickly for perhaps an hour, reeling off a long string of “facts.” His debating opponent, of course, didn’t have the chance even to note down all those “facts,” let alone work out whether or not they were correct. In his or her rebuttal, the opponent could either ignore Gish’s tirade altogether, which would look like dodging the issue, or try to answer as many of the points as possible, which meant looking as if he or she were floundering. Gish’s trick was a clever one, and it fooled a lot of audiences.
He didn’t always get away with it, however. Several people noticed that Gish’s presentation was always the same, right down to the jokes, no matter what his opponent had said. One such opponent was the evolutionary biologist Niall Shanks. Invited to debate Gish, he studied videos of Gish’s other debates. Speaking first, Shanks introduced every point he knew Gish was going to make and demolished it.
Vindictively, Shanks also stole all the jokes he knew Gish was going to make.
THE ARGUMENT FROM AUTHORITY
The Gish Gallop is still a popular technique used by bullshitters, and it’s sometimes deployed in conjunction with the closely related argumentum verbosium, sometimes called the proof by intimidation. Here, the bullshitter uses as much obscure information and terminology as possible in making his claim. Perhaps, too, the bullshitter will cite obscure sources or authorities.
The honest reply to this baffling wave of nonsense is that you have absolutely no idea what the bullshitter is talking about . . . except, of course, that this can make you look ignorant and/or stupid in the eyes of the audience—just what the bullshitter wants.
The bullshitter who cites obscure sources as part of the argumentum verbosium is relying on the fact that you probably won’t bother checking those sources. It’s very common for the purveyors of bullshit to write books with huge notes sections at the back, knowing that most people will accept the phony scholarship at face value. In these cases, sometimes someone does take on the gargantuan task of checking all the sources, and that can make the bullshitter look pretty silly—we saw what happened when John Abraham checked Christopher Monckton’s sources. Most often, though, the people who’ve been swallowing the bullshit ignore such debunking exercises.
This method of bullshitting assumes that there’s nothing wrong with the sources themselves—it’s merely that the bullshitter has been misrepresenting them. But what if the “experts” he’s citing aren’t experts at all? Or perhaps the experts are genuinely experts but, like everyone else, sometimes make mistakes.
Most nonfiction books today use the argument from authority extensively. Authors and researchers build on the work of others (“authorities”) who’ve gone before them. The argument from authority can be a very useful tool—imagine how long a modern scientific paper would be if its author were forced to start at the level of the Pythagorean theorem or Euclid’s laws and explain every theory or process from the ground up!
Just like the bullshitter who packs the back of his book with a gazillion endnotes referring to dubious sources, the genuine writer cites lots of authorities to back up her claims. Thus the argument from authority can be used either wisely and honestly, or to deceive or mislead. Baloney-mongers very frequently abuse the argument from authority (so much so, in fact, that some people think the term “argument from authority” always implies a dishonest gambit). For example, they may point out that Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Who are you to disagree with the Great Man?
Well, yes, but when Newton was alive (1642–1727) there was no reason to think the world was anything but just a few thousand years old. In 1650 an Irish cleric, Archbishop James Ussher, had carefully counted through the events of the Old Testament and, making lots of assumptions (for example, he simply guessed at the lifespans of quite a lot of the individuals mentioned), had calculated that the earth had been created in 4004 BCE. (He even got specific, stating that the earth was formed during the evening of October 22 of that year!) Ussher was a very widely admired scholar, and his calculations were assumed to be correct. There was no reason for Newton to disagree with them.
There were plenty of other things Newton didn’t know. He knew nothing about viruses or bacteria. He didn’t know the planets Uranus and Neptune existed, or that the sun’s energy comes mainly from the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. He was ignorant of all sorts of bits of knowledge that you and I take for granted. He’s a quite useless “authority” to cite in a debate about the age of the earth!
THE PLURAL OF “ANECDOTE” ISN’T “EVIDENCE”
Lots of people believe they’ve seen UFOs; you may be one of them. The key point is that “UFO” stands for “unidentified flying object.” I’ve seen a couple of UFOs myself, one of which I was able to identify within minutes (it was a plane, and the sunlight was catching it at a funny angle) and the other of which took me a bit longer (it was an odd refraction effect). Plenty of people reckon they’ve seen ghosts, fairies, the Loch Ness monster, and other elusive figures.
To a scientist, all of these anecdotal accounts mean almost nothing in terms of evidence. Just because lots of people have seen unexplained lights in the sky does not mean that the earth is being regularly visited by aliens in flying saucers. Some perfectly sincere people have “memories” of being abducted by those same aliens, who subjected them to humiliating physical experimentation. It’s worth remembering that a few centuries ago those same lights in the sky were believed to be witches on broomsticks, some of whom could transport people away to force them to take part in, yes, humiliating physical rituals. There’s no more reason to believe the anecdotes about flying saucers than there is to believe those about witches.1
The professional bullshitter, however, bets on the fact that most of us will think that if lots of people have reported something, then it must be true—or, at least, that the bullshitter’s explanation of it must be true.
Of course, it’s always possible that the anecdotes really do stack up to something that is worth further investigation. But we have to do the actual investigation of the anecdotal evidence, not just assume the collection of anecdotes is the investigation.
OTHER CUNNING TRICKS
When President George W. Bush said in 2003 that the science of climate change “isn’t settled,” it sounded to many people as if he were being admirably cautious. In fact, for years the consensus among climate scientists had been firmly established, and all Bush was doing was using the pretense of caution as an excuse for doing nothing.
The science isn’t settled trick is far from unique to Bush, though. Some of the people who claim that vaccination is dangerous, when confronted by the overwhelming evidence that it’s quite extraordinarily safer than the diseases it protects against, will likewise claim that “the science isn’t settled” and point to old and discredited scientific papers that support their beliefs. Related tactics are pointing out false anomalies and shifting the goalposts.
It has often been observed that you need to find just one absolute and incontrovertible proof of a ghost to bring down the idea that there’s no such thing as life after death. That single ghost would—or could—represent an anomaly that it’d be hard for the rationalist worldview to explain. A common technique of bullshitters is to extend that argument to include what are, by any sensible definition, false anomalies. An annual example of this is when there’s a nasty winter blizzard or two. All sorts of people pop up to say that this is “proof” there’s no such thing as global warming—all while ignoring the past year’s tornadoes, floods, hurricanes or typhoons, droughts, species migrations . . . A single heavy winter snowfall doesn’t indicate anything wrong with our scientific understanding of climate change.
The best-known bullshitter use of the tactic known as shifting the goalposts concerns transitional fossils. Fossil records offer us snapshots of the life forms that inhabited our planet going back billions of years. Ideally, fossil records would show us a complete picture. However, there are various reasons why they don’t:
• Fossils form only in very specific geological circumstances. When a particular plant or animal dies, the odds against its remains undergoing fossilization are enormous.
• If the circumstances are just right, life forms with bones can form fossils relatively easily. But most life forms don’t have bones.
• Almost all of the fossils that have ever formed have since been recycled by natural geological processes—they’re now rock or soil.
• Fossils that have survived this recycling are usually now in the middle of a sedimentary rock. Since we can’t go around busting open every sedimentary rock, we can only ever find just a tiny percentage of all the fossils that exist.
Ignoring all of these points, creationists often demand that biologists should produce fossils of transitional species: If you’re saying that chickens are descended from dinosaurs, then where are all the fossils that show creatures midway between T. rex and a Rhode Island Red?
In fact, there are lots of intermediate fossils between dinosaurs and modern birds. We can trace all sorts of evolutionary ancestries through the fossil record. Moreover, new fossils are being unearthed all the time. Every now and then—pretty often, in fact—one of those fossils fills in a gap between two previously known prehistoric species. Here’s how the routine goes:
• We’ve just discovered Fossil C, hurray!
• It represents a species that lies halfway between the ones we knew about from Fossil A and Fossil B.
It’s at this point that the creationist steps in to complain that we haven’t solved the transitional-fossil problem at all, because where are the transitional forms between Fossil A and Fossil C and between Fossil C and Fossil B? It’s obvious why this tactic is called shifting the goalposts!
FALSE BALANCE
This isn’t a tactic that’s primarily annoying because of its use by bullshitters—although they do use it. False balance—or faux balance—is often used by news media, whether broadcast, print, or internet, as a lazy way of appearing to give both sides of a story.
In any sphere of human knowledge, you can always find some fruit-bat who disagrees. The earth is round? There’s a fruitbat who says it’s flat. NASA landed astronauts on the moon? There’s a fruitbat who says it was all a hoax mounted by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. You’ve had a run of bad luck? There’s a fruitbat who says this is just because you haven’t been asking the right questions of the universe.1 And so on.
Most of us can tell that there’s a big difference between the rationality of the two viewpoints in each of these arguments. Yet over the past couple of decades or so, more and more of the supposedly objective media outlets have decided that the way to achieve “balance” in their reporting is to put a sane person up against a fruitbat and leave it to an often under-informed audience to sort it out.
THE “GOD OF THE GAPS” ARGUMENT
Despite the name and the fact that it’s often used by religious anti-evolutionists, this fallacy isn’t an exclusively religious one. When we’re confronted by something we don’t understand, most of us try to find a rational explanation. If we don’t understand why rainbows happen, for example, we go to Wikipedia and look at the entry on rainbows. There are plenty of people, unfortunately, who refuse to follow that logical course. Instead, they insist that rainbows are magic.
Until just a few years ago, physicists were baffled as to why matter had mass. We all know it has mass—drop a brick on your foot and you get immediate proof!—but nobody knew why.
Well, some people thought they did. They said this was just one of those things that science couldn’t explain: There was a gap, and the only way of filling it was to invoke a supernatural explanation.
As long ago as 1964, various physicists, among them Peter Higgs, said there might be a type of particle—now called the Higgs Boson—that was responsible for this. In 2012, scientists working at CERN finally detected the Higgs Boson. This meant that this particular “god of the gaps” explanation had evaporated. There was no longer a “gap” that science had failed to fill.
In a famous TV interview in 2011, Bill O’Reilly presented an astonishing “god of the gaps” argument to his interviewee, David Silverman. It seems O’Reilly thought the tides, which have been understood by science for centuries as caused by the moon’s pull (and partly by the sun’s), were actually a proof of God:
I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You [scientists] can’t explain that.
Of course, not just rationalists but believers hurried to point out that the tides are pretty well understood and that O’Reilly had made a fool of himself.
Not that O’Reilly agrees with this assessment, of course.
PROJECTION
Finally, there’s projection, a term that comes from psychoanalysis. In more general usage, it refers to consciously or, more usually, unconsciously ascribing to others your own traits, usually your less desirable ones. So someone who lies and cheats may try to hide this from themselves or others by claiming that other people are liars and cheats.
It’s a tactic very commonly used by bullshitters. Most obviously, whenever you start trying to persuade a bullshitter to see things rationally, you’ll find yourself accused of any or all of the tricks we’ve looked at in this chapter.
In the next chapter we’ll talk about some of the ways you can defend yourself against many kinds of bullshit.
_______________
1. “Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.”
1. It does, though, seem that the people who “remember” their abductions are often perfectly honest: They genuinely believe these things happened to them. There are some good psychological explanations for the phenomenon—many suggesting that hypnagogic dreaming plays a part.
1. I kid you not. This is exactly the idea put forward in the book and DVD The Secret (2006) by Rhonda Byrne and her colleagues—see page 112.