68 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 1st 2020
2T
he inspirationfor one of the most leg-
endary (and parodied) images in world
cinema lies a half-hour’s drive north of
Stockholm, up near the ceiling of a small
medieval church. A fresco shows a ghoul-
ish skeleton and a young man, dressed in a
green robe and a brown hat, hovering over
a large chessboard. The mural at the Taby
church was painted in the 1480s. It came to
life nearly five centuries later, when it led
Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, to
cast Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, a
troubled knight, and to pit him against
Death in a chess match.
Death is everywhere in Bergman’s “The
Seventh Seal”. It rages in the Holy Land,
where Block and his squire Jons have spent
years as Crusaders, and back home in Swe-
den, where the bubonic plague has started
to spread. Before it takes him, Block wants
to understand whether his life has made
any sense, and what might await in the
hereafter. To do so he needs time, and to
have time he needs to play for it.
Between the chess game to which Block
challenges the grim reaper, the ethereal ex-pression fixed on his face throughout the
film, and the backdrop of disease, “The Sev-
enth Seal” can seem unbearably heavy, es-
pecially during today’s pandemic. Block
cannot come to terms with God’s silence.
He yearns to have faith in faith, and not in
the facile kind either. He scoffs at the
monks who claim that the plague is divine
punishment, and pities the penitent zeal-
ots, with their crosses and relics, whipping
themselves senseless with scourges. He
meets a young girl accused of being pos-
sessed by the devil and soon to be burned at
the stake, and stares into her eyes, looking
for some greater truth. He finds none.
“Faith is a torment,” he says. “It is like lov-
ing someone who is out there in the dark-
ness but never appears, no matter how
loudly you call.”
But there is a lighter, earthly side to “The
Seventh Seal”, in the form of Block’s side-
kick, Jons, who thinks of faith as less a tor-
ment than a waste of time. “He grins at
Death, mocks the Lord, laughs at himself
and leers at the girls,” Jons says of himself.
“His world is a Jons-world, believable only
to himself, ridiculous to all including him-
self, meaningless to Heaven and of no in-
terest to Hell.”
Jons goes into a church, much like the
one Bergman entered in Taby, where he
finds a painter putting the last touches to a
grisly mural, the “Dance of Death”. What,
he wonders, is the point of scaring people
like that? To make them think, answers the
painter. And if they think, Jons says, they
get more scared, and run to religion for so-
lace. Jons and the painter run to a barrel of
brandy instead, and get roaringly drunk.
The struggle between man and death is
always one-sided, and largely pointless.
The chess game is rigged. Von Sydow died
earlier this year, Bergman in 2007. Yet as he,
the son of a pastor, suggests in “The Sev-
enth Seal”, salvation may await not in the
next world, but in this one. 7Ingmar Bergman’s contemplation of
plague and death is life-enhancingPandemic cinemaWill and grace
home
entertainmentgrowing catalogue of “bullshit”, malign
and otherwise, which they debunk for stu-
dents at the University of Washington.
Out of that course they have spun “Call-
ing Bullshit”, a helpful guide to navigating a
world full of doubtful claims based on spu-
rious data. Using clever anecdotes, nods to
online culture and allusions to ancient
philosophy, the book tells ordinary readers
how to spot nonsense—even if they are not
numerical whizzes. As well as sketching
the difference between correlation and
causality, the authors outline visualisation
techniques and explain machine learning
to arm people against assertions that seem,
and so probably are, either “too good or too
bad to be true”.
There is, alas, no shortage of material.
In one of their examples, a widely shared
scholarly article seems to show that musi-
cians from genres such as rap and hip-hop
die much younger than those who play
blues or jazz. The researchers in question
calculate that half of all hip-hop musicians
are murdered—a classic case of a claim too
bad to be true. Messrs Bergstrom and West
show where they went wrong: the raw
numbers are not incorrect, but the picture
they paint is incomplete, because they dis-
count performers who are still alive. As rap
music only began in the 1970s, rappers who
have already died tend to have done so
younger than those from the more venera-
ble genres cited in the article.
The ways of deceit and error with data
are many—and the authors point them out
ruthlessly. Their fellow scientists, the me-
dia, the “tedbrand of bullshit”: no one is
spared. They describe how the findings of a
study can be manipulated to make them
seem statistically important even when
they are not, and how feeding an algorithm
skewed inputs yields unreliable results.
For instance, in 2017 two scientists sparked
ethical concerns by claiming to have built
an algorithm that could guess whether a
person was gay or straight on the basis of
pictures gleaned from a dating site. The pa-
per, which The Economistcovered at the
time, failed to mention that their “gaydar”
may have been responding to variations in
how people choose to present themselves
(make-up, poses and so on), rather than to
authentic physical differences.
While charts depicting the life expec-
tancy of musicians are hardly lethal them-
selves, purporting to discern a person’s
character from dodgy variables is perilous.
Amid the pandemic, misinformation
about infection rates and the efficacy of
drugs—often bolstered by sneaky graphics,
as in Georgia—is a particular concern.
Some scientists are bypassing the usual
peer-review process. Meanwhile news-
rooms are under ever-greater pressure to
attract clicks. More and more bullshit is
contaminating debate. Mr Bergstrom and
Mr West picked a good time to expose it. 7