The BS App
We have an app for almost everything but, hopefully, someone will soon develop the Bullsh*t App. Today, with social and traditional media in our faces almost every single moment of the day, we are facing a tidal wave of false or misleading information. Apparently, if you know it’s bullsh*t there’s a button you can get for your phone that cries out phrases. But between the media, the politicians, some of the scientists, and the salespeople that make a living out of science-driven BS, how are we supposed to know when we are getting the story straight? Particularly, when it appears that being good at bullsh*ting takes brains.
The goal is to try to get us to change our minds and then our behavior. In some cases, it’s to buy something we really don’t need. We have Marie Kondo to tell us how to get rid of junk that doesn’t spark joy, but what we really need to know is when we are being tricked into buying something we don’t really need or want. We also need to know when news is being curated, as Sharyl Attkisson tells us, to fit into a preconceived narrative.
I know both Google and iPhones have apps that tell you what song you are humming or listening to. I’m guessing a BS app would probably be a bit more complicated to develop, so perhaps we need to start thinking about rules that can be used in an artificial intelligence (AI) app. Here are a few rules to get us started:
Rule 1: Claiming giant catastrophes based on small personal behaviors. If someone, say on a public broadcasting network, is making excessive statements about why you must do something, it is usually BS. For example, it will usually be a young person, speaking in a low, breathless voice about something that they are passionate about. Then will come the pitch, “If you continue to eat meat, you will be responsible for destroying the planet.” Nope, our planet is 4.5 billion years old and you eating a few more cows won’t necessarily be a great thing (for the cows or the environment), but it won’t destroy an entire planet.
Rule 2: Using anecdotes as evidence of trends. For example, if it was hot yesterday, or it snowed in May, it isn’t a sign of global anything. Weather is an anecdote. Climate is a two-dimensional whole lot of weather days in a row. Anecdotes are not trends.
Rule 3: Assigning hate or blame to individuals based on group with which they identify. If the speaker says that there is something morally bankrupt about any group of people based on their religion, age, nationality, or skin color, that is BS. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to get people to hate the group or have members of the group hate themselves (or feel ashamed) - we are individuals and should be treated as such. This BS is fairly easily spotted.
Rule 4: Appealing to credentialism: It doesn’t matter whether the degree is a Ph.D. (piled higher and deeper) or an M.D., there are those who try to convince us that a degree implies that everyone with the “Dr.” prefix must be believed. Nope, there are quacks in every profession so that appeal is just BS.
In the commercial realm, we can use rules found in the book Influence by Robert Caldini. Whether they are trying to get you to support a cause or buy a product, there are time-tested ways of getting you to do something you don’t want to do.
Here’s just a few of them.
Rule 5: Scarcity. “This is the last one in stock and there are other people looking at it right now.” If you believe there is a shortage, it makes you want to buy it even if you don’t really want or need it that badly. BS.
Rule 6. Beautiful people. When I was managing a fast-food restaurant, my director made it clear to me to always ensure we had a pretty young woman on the cash register. It was a tested practice and it worked to make people order more. Beautiful but still BS.
Rule 7: Social Proof. If everyone, particularly people like you or members of your philosophical persuasion believe it or are buying it, then you should too.
That’s a short list of BS-detection rules and I’m sure we can come up with more. As we now have AI that can write stories and papers, we are hopefully going to see AI capable of understanding meaning and context. We can all help by thinking of rules that can be used to develop AI apps and, who knows, maybe someday they will evolve into machine learningBS detectors.
If you do develop this app, you’ll make a zillion dollars, win the admiration of everyone on the planet, save the entire galaxy from annihilation, and go to Heaven. You can be assured all of that will happen because I have a Ph.D.