Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

To prepare themselves for future success in the American workforce, today’s college students are increasingly choosing courses in business, biomedical science, engineering, computer science and various health-related disciplines.

These classes are bound to help undergraduates capitalize on the “college payoff”, but chances are good that none of them comes with a promise of this magnitude: “We will be astonished if these skills [learned in this course] do not turn out to be the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.”

Sound like bullshit? If so, there’s no better way to detect it than to consider the class that makes the claim. Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World, designed and co-taught by the University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, begins with a premise so obvious we barely lend it the attention it deserves: “Our world is saturated with bullshit.” And so, every week for 12 weeks, the professors expose “one specific facet of bullshit”, doing so in the explicit spirit of resistance. “This is,” they explain, “our attempt to fight back.”

The problem of bullshit transcends political bounds, the class teaches. The proliferation of bullshit, according to West and Bergstrom, is “not a matter of left- or rightwing ideology; both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit. Rather (and at the risk of grandiose language) adequate bullshit detection strikes us as essential to the survival of liberal democracy.” They make it a point to stress that they began to work on the syllabus for this class back in 2015 – it’s not, they clarify, “a swipe at the Trump administration”.

Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? West and Bergstrom think that it is. They write, “Whether or not that usage is appropriate, we feel that the verb phrase calling bullshit definitely applies to falsehoods irrespective of the intentions of the author or speaker.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/16/calling-bullshit-college-class-news-information?fbclid=IwAR1XXzBeEQWApkX529Sati6KZfz4DFiptw2xBwR_Gug2iyfJZdHldEbtg2s

Or as Carl Sagan called it more politely in the book "The Demon Haunted World" the fine art of baloney detection.

[pnwmom]

1. They need to teach something like this in HIGH SCHOOL, which is still when most Americans

end their education.

[tclambert]

2. Back during the Cold War, we called this "Fighting Propaganda."

I remember a unit in "American Citizenship" where we discussed both Soviet propaganda and American advertising. The Soviets would say, "In an international competition, the Soviet Union's team came in second, and the Americans finished second from last." But there were only two teams, so that meant the Americans won. In advertising, "4 out of 5 dentists surveyed" agreed to something. It sounds like it means 80% of all dentists, a vast majority, agreed. But in fact it says they only asked 5 dentists, and we have no idea how they chose those 5 and why they couldn't get 5 to back their claim.

It feels like deja vu all over again that today we have to worry about Russians promoting false advertising claims to influence our politics.