A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck91%

2/17/2026, 7:41:57 PM

BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Halo Effect, and Appeal to Authority, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 36.5% saturation with 69 hits. Analysis detected 418 faulty-reasoning hits from 189 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 86.3% and a BS Rank of 91% (1,519 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 91.00% of the article peer group.

Lots of people dream about leaving it all behind, but Maurice and Maralyn Bailey really did it. 
They bought a boat and set sail in June of 1972. 
They’d been living on the ocean for a year when it happened. 
A breaching whale ran into their boat  and destroyed the vessel. 
Now adrift on a raft in the vast Pacific, the Baileys had little to live on. 
And if sharks and starvation didn’t make for enough suffering, there was also the matter of dealing with each other, and the cracks in their marriage that started splitting wider as they fought to survive. 
The writer Sophie Elmhirst tells the story in her new book, and she’s joining us to talk about what happens when a marriage is pushed to the furthest extremes possible. 
GUEST 
Sophie Elmhirst is a journalist who writes regularly for The Guardian Long Read and The Economist. 
Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. 
Her book first book is A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck. 
Originally broadcast 8/28/25 
Confirmation Bias
0%
Anchoring Bias
0%
Availability Heuristic
6.3%
Representativeness Heuristic
9%
Hindsight Bias
6.3%
Overconfidence Bias
0%
Framing Effect
36.5%
Loss Aversion
0%
Status Quo Bias
0%
Sunk Cost Effect
0%
Optimism Bias
0%
Pessimism Bias
8.5%
Negativity Bias
24.9%
Self-Serving Bias
0%
Fundamental Attribution Error
0%
Actor-Observer Bias
0%
In-Group Bias
0%
Out-Group Homogeneity Bias
0%
Halo Effect
34.4%
Horn Effect
0%
Dunning-Kruger Effect
0%
Recency Bias
0%
Primacy Effect
0%
Blind-Spot Bias
0%
Ad Hominem
0%
Straw Man
0%
Appeal to Authority
34.4%
False Dilemma
0%
Slippery Slope
0%
Circular Reasoning
0%
Hasty Generalization
15.9%
Red Herring
0%
Bandwagon
0%
Appeal to Emotion
36%
Begging the Question
0%
Post Hoc (False Cause)
0%
Tu Quoque
0%
Burden of Proof
0%
Appeal to Nature
0%
Composition/Division
0%
Anecdotal
9%
No True Scotsman
0%
Ambiguity (Equivocation)
0%
Gambler’s Fallacy
0%
Middle Ground
0%
Personal Incredulity
0%
Special Pleading
0%
Genetic Fallacy
0%
Unattributed Quote
0%
Biased Writer Voice
0%
Politically Left Leaning Bias
0%
Politically Right Leaning Bias
0%
Attempt to Sell a Product or Service
0%

189 words analyzed.

Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.