Too much information, too much BS and too much happiness?
“My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”
That’s how the narrator of Alice Munro’s short story “Some Women” in her collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness, describes her thirteen year old self’s mind. She says this shortly after breaking into a conversation with the correct factoid in reply to a trivia question posed by the dying man she was being paid to care for. Who hasn’t at some point enjoyed the satisfaction that comes with having the right answer? The other woman in the room, a masseuse, did not know the answer to the question and the trivia question was concerning her own name no less. While the narrator was enjoying her moment of correctness, she was shocked to notice that the man who asked the question found the other woman’s ignorance delicious. Let’s hope a smaller number of us have rejoiced in others’ failings.
Like the magpie and his shiny objects, and the thirteen year old girl and her factoids, we gather and marshal information with purpose, trying to collect something meaningful and actionable. Sometimes we have what we need when we need it, but not always. Information is more slippery than we sometimes acknowledge. The same information can in fact mean different things to different people. As Cass Sunstein notes in his guide to better information mandate policy-making, Too Much Information, psychology changes everything. This is why greater care must be brought to what governments require to be disclosed. Other times seemingly important and vital data and statistics turn out to be plain old misleading. Carl Bergstrom wants to help you separate the cure from the snake oil in his and Jevin D West’s book, Calling Bullshit. Together, the authors of Calling Bullshit teach a course on it at the University of Washington. They think everyone should be educated on how to recognize and call out bullshit. I guess if there was a preschool introductory course, we could call it: Sharing is caring but bullshirting is always hurting. :-)
Both books are useful as we try to think about risk better together. Because there are lots of salesmen trying to convince us of miracle cures for the things that could kill us, couching their misleading statements in superfluous mathematical and scientific jargon. And even accurate information can confound and overwhelm without intent. Sunstein and Bergstrom provide us with the tools to better process and understand the data that feeds our risk decision-making, including how too much information or bad information or information we badly process can generate new risks of their own.
Taxing Truths and Flying Falsehoods is available now wherever you get your podcasts.
