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University Offers Course To Help Sniff Out and Refute 'Bullshit' (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: There's now a course at the University of Washington, "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data" that helps you find bad information and show others why it's bad. The instructors, Professors Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom, jokingly write that "we will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful ... that you acquire during the course of your college education." They add that the intention is not to be political, as "both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit." The intention, then, is to arm students (and the public if they want) with the tools to combat a scourge of misinformation that's aided and abetted by social media.
Among members of the football and basketball teams, and pre-meds trying to preserve their 4.0.
A so-called "classic" book called "How to Lie With Statistics" was published before I was born (and I'm old). That book has had plenty of successors.
The last presidency that didn't distribute significant amounts of misinformation was the Coolidge presidency.
> I just use the old adage about how you can tell if a politician is lying...his lips are moving.
Ah, I see. So all politicians are the same, ergo one should feel free to vote for whichever of them are telling the lies you want to hear. Simpleton.
The last President who wasn't an utter inveterate lying sack of shit was probably George H. W. Bush,
Note that H W had the most famous, "Read My Lips" lie.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Names like those are a rhetorical device designed to shore up waverers on your own side, not to convert the opposition.
You cite an anecdotal article which does not apply to where most people are complaining about voter ID. Many elderly people, for example, lack an ID. In some rural areas it is also difficult to get an ID since the DMV is often a significant distance away and is open for a limited number of hours, often during working hours. Harlem has a very different makeup than rural areas and access to an ID is far easier.
Here is a better article. About 11% of Americans do not have government issued photo identification cards. A federal court in Texas found that 608,740 registered voters didn't have the forms of identification required for voting.
The amount of voter fraud in the United States is exceedingly low so the whole voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem. Out of 1 billion votes cast there were 44 cases of fraud, a rate of 0.0000044%.
There is also widespread evidence that such laws are designed to target democratic voters and that they tend to target the poor and minorities.
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