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Bullshit Comparisons: A Field Guide to Thinking Critically in a World of Difference
Bullshit Comparisons will challenge the way you think about rankings, charts and other marketing and political tools designed to create odious and dangerous comparisons.
Is Boris Johnson really like Winston Churchill? Are electric cars actually greener than petrol ones? Which is the world's most successful university? Is Lisbon the new Barcelona? Should we compare the achievements of younger and older siblings even when we know it damages their self-worth? We make comparisons every day, but how helpful are they?
Looking across a dazzling range of situations both familiar and unfamiliar, Bullshit Comparisons is a ground-breaking examination of the role of comparison in modern society, illuminated by examples spanning from the FIFA World Footballer of the year, to wine-tasting in London, hospital care in Sierra Leone and avocado farming in Colombia.
Challenging us to think critically about the use of comparison through accessible, personal, and often amusing research, Andrew Brooks reveals the uses and abuses of comparisons in a book that isn't like anything else you have read.
Is Boris Johnson really like Winston Churchill? Are electric cars actually greener than petrol ones? Which is the world's most successful university? Is Lisbon the new Barcelona? Should we compare the achievements of younger and older siblings even when we know it damages their self-worth? We make comparisons every day, but how helpful are they?
Looking across a dazzling range of situations both familiar and unfamiliar, Bullshit Comparisons is a ground-breaking examination of the role of comparison in modern society, illuminated by examples spanning from the FIFA World Footballer of the year, to wine-tasting in London, hospital care in Sierra Leone and avocado farming in Colombia.
Challenging us to think critically about the use of comparison through accessible, personal, and often amusing research, Andrew Brooks reveals the uses and abuses of comparisons in a book that isn't like anything else you have read.
- GenresNonfictionAudiobook
256 pages, Hardcover
Published May 21, 2024
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73 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2024
while some of the chapters are interesting, the book really doesn‘t deliver on its promise. for one, the author never discusses how comparisions work, what makes them bullshit, how exactly they can be objectionable… and some chapters are just not convincing. if the author admits that there are parallels between palestine and apartheid, what exactly makes the comparison bad? the claim, after all, is not that they are identical.
December 31, 2024
Book was bullshit...
January 5, 2025
"..., but millions of new fossil-fueled engines pumped carbon emissions into the atmosphere and transformed the global climate."
How can someone call BS on things if he is that naive? The author wrote that after Columbus discovery ~80% of native Americans were killed by "diseases"? Ha ha ha, really? Are you that naive? Not because of genocide?
No matter how educated you are and well read and studied you are, you just cannot get rid of blind belief in propaganda and authority and that is the authors ultimate Achilles heel. While he can be skeptical of some things and is rightfully claiming that some comparisons are absurd, ultimately it does not go far enough that would make this work stand out.
How can someone call BS on things if he is that naive? The author wrote that after Columbus discovery ~80% of native Americans were killed by "diseases"? Ha ha ha, really? Are you that naive? Not because of genocide?
No matter how educated you are and well read and studied you are, you just cannot get rid of blind belief in propaganda and authority and that is the authors ultimate Achilles heel. While he can be skeptical of some things and is rightfully claiming that some comparisons are absurd, ultimately it does not go far enough that would make this work stand out.
July 9, 2024
I enjoyed this book but it was not really what I expected it to be. The author discussed some of the rather spurious comparisons that are made between people (who's the greatest Briton), places (such as university rankings) and history (such as China's colonialism and is Israel apartheid). Overall it is an easy and enjoyable read but for me there is not a clear threat to the arguments running through it and so I am not sure what I have really learned from it.
November 3, 2024
This is a worthwhile book, but it could have done with a bit more cooking. The threads don't quite hang together or come together cohesively.
The core of Brooks' point is this: making comparisons and drawing analogies is an easy way to make an argument, but it's often not very accurate. We need to be conscious that when we make comparisons (or someone else makes them) they're balancing ease-of-making-a-point against accuracy-of-the-point. Often we are not conscious of that, and so we take the comparisons too literally (or argue against them too vigorously).
He illustrates this with numerous examples, none of which tie together very well. The first chapters are about the mental health effects of parents comparing their kids or fans comparing sportspeople, which are no doubt important but seem divorced from the wider issue of rhetorical comparisons.
Then we move into place-based comparisons (is Israel-Palestine comparable to Apartheid South Africa?). This is interesting, but leaves out a crucial consideration: Brooks is at pains to illustrate that Israel-Palestine and Apartheid South Africa are not comparable, on the basis that the two places are radically different. South Africa is very large, Israel-Palestine is very small. Israelis and Palestinians are about half each of the population of their lands; white South Africans were a tiny minority dominating a huge majority, therefore comparison not accurate.
This is troublesome for two reasons related to Brooks' wider aim of illustrating how we need to be conscientious about using comparisons:
1. It rejects the role of how language and thought evolve and how they assign significant features to words and ideas. Organisations around the world, up to and including United Nations, have settled on a definition of apartheid which relies on the significant features of racialised rule of law. If Brooks feels—rightly—that there were other significant features of apartheid South Africa which don't compare to Israel-Palestine then he's right to make that point, but it does not follow that apartheid can't be applied there. Apartheid is a word that means something, and Mr. Brooks doesn't get to retroactively decide what it means.
2. Mr. Brooks doesn't admit the balancing role of analogies and comparisons. If we accepted his telling then almost no comparison would be valid almost ever: Israel-Palestine isn't experiencing apartheid because it doesn't have the very particular features—Bantustans, an off-kilter demographic balance, political boundaries and a specific administrative regime, durably mobile labour—that Brooks wants to use as the definition of apartheid. But no one said Israel-Palestine is South Africa, they said it's like apartheid South Africa, balancing accuracy against recognisability. The test of analogies is not "is this correct in every particular?". It's "is this illustrative and does it reflect salient facts?" Otherwise no word could ever be applied more broadly than its original context. Mr. Putin's regime in the Russian Federation is widely accepted as being fascist, for instance; one wonders whether Brooks would accept that definition, since Mr. Putin doesn't speak Italian or German, doesn't have '30s era military hardware, and doesn't have a moustache.
Some of Brooks' points are well made and enlightening: he observes the way that British culture loves to draw comparisons between pretty much everything and the Second World War, and that there are almost never any salient similarities so the comparisons are bullshit. The comparisons are bullshit because there are no significant similarities, though, not because there aren't enough to satisfy Mr. Brooks in particular.
The lack of clarity around that critical point seriously undermines Brooks' analysis. His argument could be salvaged, but it needed another round of ferocious editing.
The core of Brooks' point is this: making comparisons and drawing analogies is an easy way to make an argument, but it's often not very accurate. We need to be conscious that when we make comparisons (or someone else makes them) they're balancing ease-of-making-a-point against accuracy-of-the-point. Often we are not conscious of that, and so we take the comparisons too literally (or argue against them too vigorously).
He illustrates this with numerous examples, none of which tie together very well. The first chapters are about the mental health effects of parents comparing their kids or fans comparing sportspeople, which are no doubt important but seem divorced from the wider issue of rhetorical comparisons.
Then we move into place-based comparisons (is Israel-Palestine comparable to Apartheid South Africa?). This is interesting, but leaves out a crucial consideration: Brooks is at pains to illustrate that Israel-Palestine and Apartheid South Africa are not comparable, on the basis that the two places are radically different. South Africa is very large, Israel-Palestine is very small. Israelis and Palestinians are about half each of the population of their lands; white South Africans were a tiny minority dominating a huge majority, therefore comparison not accurate.
This is troublesome for two reasons related to Brooks' wider aim of illustrating how we need to be conscientious about using comparisons:
1. It rejects the role of how language and thought evolve and how they assign significant features to words and ideas. Organisations around the world, up to and including United Nations, have settled on a definition of apartheid which relies on the significant features of racialised rule of law. If Brooks feels—rightly—that there were other significant features of apartheid South Africa which don't compare to Israel-Palestine then he's right to make that point, but it does not follow that apartheid can't be applied there. Apartheid is a word that means something, and Mr. Brooks doesn't get to retroactively decide what it means.
2. Mr. Brooks doesn't admit the balancing role of analogies and comparisons. If we accepted his telling then almost no comparison would be valid almost ever: Israel-Palestine isn't experiencing apartheid because it doesn't have the very particular features—Bantustans, an off-kilter demographic balance, political boundaries and a specific administrative regime, durably mobile labour—that Brooks wants to use as the definition of apartheid. But no one said Israel-Palestine is South Africa, they said it's like apartheid South Africa, balancing accuracy against recognisability. The test of analogies is not "is this correct in every particular?". It's "is this illustrative and does it reflect salient facts?" Otherwise no word could ever be applied more broadly than its original context. Mr. Putin's regime in the Russian Federation is widely accepted as being fascist, for instance; one wonders whether Brooks would accept that definition, since Mr. Putin doesn't speak Italian or German, doesn't have '30s era military hardware, and doesn't have a moustache.
Some of Brooks' points are well made and enlightening: he observes the way that British culture loves to draw comparisons between pretty much everything and the Second World War, and that there are almost never any salient similarities so the comparisons are bullshit. The comparisons are bullshit because there are no significant similarities, though, not because there aren't enough to satisfy Mr. Brooks in particular.
The lack of clarity around that critical point seriously undermines Brooks' analysis. His argument could be salvaged, but it needed another round of ferocious editing.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews