Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

In fact, welcome to a special bullshit edition of the Mindscape Podcast.

Now, I know what you're thinking. There's probably plenty of other episodes of Mindscape,

which qualify as bullshit, but this is not supposed to be a description of the episode,

as a description of what the episode is about. I apologize for anyone who finds the language a

little bit colorful or spicy, but bullshit has become a technical term in philosophy ever since

the publication in 2005 of On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. The idea was supposed to be that

bullshit is different than lying. In lying, you know that there's some truth and you're telling

the opposite of it. Whereas in bullshit, it's not that you're trying to tell untruths,

just that you don't care what the truth is. You have something that you want people to believe,

and that's what you're going to try to make them do. So today's guest, Karl Bergstrom,

is a biologist at the University of Washington, who studies the role of information in biology.

Not especially information in some highbrow information theory sense, although there is that,

but how organisms use information, how organisms share information with each other,

and sometimes information that is not true. Basically, even crustaceans and birds can

bullshit each other in the correct circumstances. So this naturally led him to study the flow of

information in social networks among human beings, and now it's made him an expert in the

COVID-19 era of the amount of bullshit that we're hearing over social media and even over

respectable news organizations about what this pandemic is doing to us. He's perfectly situated

to talk about this because Karl and his colleague, Jevin West, have been teaching a course that is

now turned in to a published book called Calling Bullshit, the Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.

It's especially about how we can use charts and graphs and numbers and data to make a case that

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