Recently I saw a short lecture titled "Not Always BS: A Simple Explanation of Statistics." That's funny, because there was some BS. The presenter was a nice and entertaining guy, but his work with statistics was limited to manipulating spreadsheets, and he didn't know any actual formulae. So when he said that using too large a sample size runs the risk of queering the stats, several of our ears perked up. Someone called him on it, there was some back-and-forth, and he finally said, "my boss has studied math and statistics for many years, and he's said that, or I've heard arguments floating around that, large samples can produce artificial significance." I could see his mind churning and his face blushing as he delicately pieced together that magically bullitious phrase "I've heard arguments floating around that..."

He was like a cartoon character who'd run off the edge of a cliff, held aloft solely by his quickly disintegrating unawareness of no grounding. But, with his legs still moving, he made it to the other side of the canyon and continued with the lecture.

The previous night I'd watched a screener for Gonzo, a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, and learned about one of his airwalk routines. In Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, Thompson wrote about a candidate he wanted to take down: "word leaked out that some of [Ed] Muskie's top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with "some kind of strange drug" that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of."

Thompson later explained, "I started the rumor, but there was a rumor," thus insisting on the veracity of his reporting. Describing an awkward stump speech in Miami, he wrote: "It is entirely conceivable -- given the known effects of Ibogaine -- that Muskie's brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs." The claims about statistics and ibogaine were both baseless, but while the stats guy was Wile E. Coyote, Thompson was Evel Knievel, turning tricks across the chasm with a huge grin on his face.

What do these two very distinct examples of BS have in common? And what makes them different from lying, or being wrong? Well, in On Bullshit, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines bull as the effort to sell something--whether it's an idea, a product, or an image--with no regard for the its truth, or lack thereof. Similarly, Harry Collins, an expert on expertise at Cardiff University, proposed to me that BSing is when you give the impression that you have more grounds for making your claim than you do. Stats guy was selling the idea that he knew what he was talking about by invoking knowledgeable sources; Thompson was selling the idea that Muskie was a druggie by mentioning talk among reporters.

Now, you could argue that Thompson knew Muskie wasn't on ibogaine, so it was a lie, not BS. But he couldn't be 100% sure Muskie was NOT on ibogaine. In fact his claim was a backlash against the campaign; he couldn't confirm whether it was true or not because he'd had his press pass rescinded (simply for lending it to an alcoholic ex-con who hopped on the Muskie campaign train and ran amok.) After taking bulldung from politicians for so long, Thompson was hoping to run his own--sorry for this--smear campaign.