How to Tell Truth From BS

How to Spot Bull$**t in Healthcare, Politics, and in General

When it comes to the ACA we hear a lot of talking points, that means a lot of lies, truths, and half-truths. We tell you how to spot the BS.

How can you tell BS from truth? It isn’t easy, but two things that help me are:

1. Understanding Bias.
2. Understand what BS is.

In short, bias is any learned behavior or instinct for or against, and BS describes the delivery of a lie, truth, or half-truth in a dishonest way.

Saying, “if you like your plan you can keep it…” (a half-truth) was BS. Believing ObamaCare is bad because it has the word Obama in it is bias.

The Greeks believed that steering the ship of the state was a position of the highest virtue… but in modern times it can become tempting to question if we perhaps aren’t lacking a sense of moral virtue in politics (not religious virtue per-say, but philosophical morality as an aspect of the human condition).

How can we say “greed is good” and “lets build a wall” without considering aspects of morality, psychology, and the concept of BS?

Anyway, instead of going in depth on these topics here, I’ll simply point you to our “everything but the ACA” website FactMyth.com. On FactMyth we dissect commonly held beliefs and call BS or confirm with peer-reviewed citation, explainer videos, and (when we can) comedy.

Check out our pages on:

• Can people be unbiased?
• Are there different types of BS?
• What is moral virtue?
• Are there different types of good and evil?
• What is the velocity of money?
• Do rich people save more?