Slashdot Mirror
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.
A conventional lie is detectable because of the network of falsehoods that must necessarily support a consistent sounding alternative picture of the world. Often the best way to detect a liar is to invite him to elaborate on his statements, until the entire fabric of falsehood is unsupportable.
Bullshit doesn't try to create an elaborately self-consistent fabric of false beliefs. Bullshit doesn't even bother being consistent with itself. Bullshit persuade through the power of how it makes you feel in the moment, and as a bullshitter rattles on he keeps his audience enthralled moment by moment even as he contradicts himself.
So to detect lies you need epistemological skills. To detect bullshit you need strength of character.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Now I can get my official degree as a bullshit-detector.
There are formal fallacies and informal fallacies. Outside of rigidly defined formal logic like math or restructuring into syllogism, there are no formal fallacies.
For a person with that handle you really ought to learn the difference and why it matters. Even in your post, there are several to choose from including the fallacy fallacy, non sequitur, ex post facto, appeal to consequence, appeal to popularity, appeal to ad hominem, non sequitur, and an existential fallacy.
Formal fallacies are difficult to apply because, ironically, you did not use logic in your post that can be turned into syllogism or any other premise-conclusion set.
The greatest benefit Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could leave to human kind is to use most of their money to fund a global free press foundation.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
They already had this. It's called citing your sources and peer review.
Having read countless research papers that fit your criteria, I can tell you that citing your sources and being peer reviewed are not nearly sufficient. They're necessary steps, to be sure, but I've read more than my fair share of papers from conferences or journals, some even associated with reputable organizations, that were nothing but complete bunk. What you need are citations to trustworthy sources and to be reviewed by trustworthy peers.
And that's the crux of the issue: this is about establishing a network of trust. Citations and peer reviews are an important part of that process, but the notion that they are sufficient in and of themselves misses the point. After all, how is a layperson supposed to know that the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is a reputable professional society that has strict ethical and legal obligations, and that the information attributable to it is likely to be trustworthy, but that the American Association for Mechanical Engineers (AAME, which I hope is a fictional entity, but who I apologize to if they actually exist) is a front that's been created by a group to push its own agenda? We see this sort of thing happening all the time in medical, environmental, and other fields that are overshadowed by partisan politics.
Moreover, even if we do manage to establish a network of trust, we still need people to actually trust it in order for it to be useful. How do we do that? By teaching them to think critically and to recognize BS. When they do, they'll naturally gravitate towards trustworthy sources that provide verifiable information. With a world full of people espousing "alternative facts", the very notion of a network of trust can become political, so it's important to train people to pursue the truth even when it doesn't jibe with what they want to believe, otherwise they'll be perfectly content reading peer-reviewed nonsense filled with citations to worthless publications.
It's a shame that fact-based reporting and analysis has become viewed as politically driven, but that's the world we live in. I do agree that citations and peer reviews are necessary, useful tools, but we need to train people to not only use those tools but to also recognize when there's a problem causing them to come up short.
Holy shit dude, you didn't even read the first sentence of the summary. Is this the new normal on Slashdot, only reading the headline?
Since you missed it, the course is called "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data". So it's about making unfounded conclusions from big data sets. Citations won't help, peer review might but there have to be some clued up peers first and that's what this course is about.
I guess somehow even the headline triggered you and you went off on a rant about safe spaces and snowflakes, but actually it's much more interesting than that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes every President lies at some point. But few lie about things so easily disproved.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Back when I was in school (when the Earth was still cooling) this was called, "Critical Thinking."
Indeed. "Critical thinking" used to mean recognizing logical fallacies and other flaws in reasoning. Unfortunately, the term has become meaningless through misuse. Today, it is often used to describe normal deductive logic and problem solving, which is not the original meaning of the term. Wikipedia lists nine different definitions, some of which contradict each other.
"A lovely young girl was seated next to Coolidge at a state dinner. She began acting rather flirtatious, batting her eyes, brushing up against his arm. She looked deeply in his eyes, with pouty lips, and said, "Mr Coolidge, my editor bet me that I couldn't get you to say more than two words tonight."
Coolidge pushed her hand off his arm, then without blinking said, "You lose."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, the nature of a certain type of complex system (e.g. governance of a herd of cats/human society) dictates a lot of the necessary behaviours of those attempting to gain leadership position by convincing people to back them. So there will be a lot of commonality of behaviour in the camapaigning politician, no matter their position on the policy/values spectrum.
There are some universals:
For example:
1. You can't get elected by promising only what you could actually deliver (given the realities of the finances and ability to shift the supertanker of state). That would be too little to meet expectations, and you would lose to your exaggerating, over-promising opponent.
In business, the corollary is, you can never win the competitive contract by bidding what it will actually take to do the job. Your dishonestly underbidding competitor will win. Instead, you have to bid low and make up the difference by charging for change requests when the customer realizes they didn't order what they really wanted.
2. A huge state with its bureaucracy and laws has enormous inertia, and any leader of it, in their short term of office, and with constitutional restrictions on power, can at best introduce a very slight leftward or rightward angle of a few degrees in the state's direction of operation. This must be contrasted with the hyperbole of election rhetoric about how sweeping the change they're going to institute will be.
3. Many people think of themselves as being in a camp or a tribe, and think there are competing camps/tribes trying to eat their lunch. Politicians often have to resort to issue-framing that paints matters in these terms, and that often works. An alternative strategy is to claim to be the great unifier, but only a few can pull this off. Anyway, when they get in office, they'll just be tweaking (landscaping) a mountain-like entrenched system rather than moving the mountain.
4. Most people for whatever reason, are still religious, so even intelligent politicans have to pretend to be religious to win. See camps above.
So it's understandable why people think politicans lie all the time. They kind of have to, to get elected. That's just how we are, as electors.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Protip: if your "truth" winds up offending lots of people, there's a good chance it's actually just your own shitty opinion. And, y'know, it's fine to have shitty opinions, it's even often fine to spout your shitty opinion out loud, it's just not a good idea to delude yourself into thinking that shitty opinion is "truth".
Furthermore, if you then feel the need to call people who object to your shitty opinion "snowflakes", there's a good chance that you're actually as sensitive, if not more so, than the people who are telling you where to stick your shitty opinion.
Was this true when a minority spoke out about slavery, or segregation, etc?
In our post-modern society, we are shaped by our family and friends. To determine what is true, we rely on family and friends to help us. There is no longer any authority that we trust to tell us the truth. That make it harder to fight against fake news. I still believe that the facts are the facts and the truth is the truth, but we end up in these larger bubbles with friends and family miss out on hearing alternate viewpoints. That makes it easier for fake news to delude us and harder for us to determine the truth. We need to listen to the alternate viewpoints even if we disagree. I think that broad background along with critical thinking will help us determine whether a story is fake news or not.
It's applicable to BOTH sides, however, and its fucking up our elections. For your consideration:
Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump. As a conservative, he felt the need to choose the Republican. But some things are making him feel uncomfortable — parts of Mr. Trump’s travel ban, for example, and the recurring theme of his apparent affinity for Russia.
Mr. Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority.
“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”
He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
The Washington Post has a similar article centering on Milo Yiannopoulos' backfiring at CPAC, but more broadly about how many of today's conservatives consider themselves "reactionaries" to what they see as smug, liberal intellectuals hell-bent on making even the most moderate conservative feel like an asshole, only to find themselves embraced by an "extremely lucrative... conservative-media industrial complex" which encourages bullshit-artists like Anne Coulter and Yiannopoulos because being an asshole grabs air-time and sells books. Whether it's all in their heads is beside the point. The point is enough people think this way to turn an election, either because they voted Trump as above, or they stayed home.
Until the U.S. can get past this finger-pointing you're-an-asshole no-you're-an-asshole bullshit, we can only expect more of the same. Fuck all I hope for is that Trump doesn't start a fucking war on account of his completely dissing the nation's intelligence community: "[Trump] has little need for intelligence professionals who, in speaking truth to power, might challenge the 'America First' orthodoxy that sees Russia as an ally and Australia as a punching bag. That’s why the president’s trusted White House advisers, not career professionals, reportedly have final say over what intelligence reaches his desk." This ain't no shit - the last time a (vice) president ignored intelligence, like there seriously ain't no WMD's in Iraq, we wound up in a war which we are STILL paying for. The only question worth asking is, how in fuck did we get here, and the answer is both sides blaming each other and calling each other assholes, grossing out all the "normal people" until almost HALF feel too disgusted to bother casting a vote.
Yes, we need bullshit-detectors in a world that churns out so much of it, but we also need to learn how to be civil to each other... or we'll just wind up with more blow-hards running things as we just pray that the markets don't collapse or we don't wind up in another war (and Trumps' just crazy enough to re-instate the draft... you 16-to-twenty-something-year-olds put that in your bowl and smoke it).
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
"Good chance" != "Absolute certainty". I'm not saying every unpopular opinion ever has been wrong. I'm saying that, probably, an offensive "truth" is, in fact, just an unpopular, and shitty, opinion.
For example: I think you're trolling. I'm not saying it's true that you're trolling... I haven't done an extensive double-blind peer-reviewed independently-verified to confirm it, I'm not saying anyone who disagrees is an idiot, I'm just basing that on my (possibly inaccurate) perception that you're using those who fought against slavery as a defense for those who fight for racism. It's my shitty opinion, that's all it is, and I'd be an idiot to assume more right now.
If, in a few hundred years, society has rebuilt itself around a shared, accepted belief that you're trolling, then hey; maybe it turned out this shitty opinion was a truth. That doesn't mean I get to call it truth now.
You mean like Obama telling Republicans "Elections have consequences" and "I won"?
Or like when he told Republicans that they could sit in the back of the bus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25HN1kZtRIw
Or like when the Democrats locked Republicans out of Obamacare meetings: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/10/22/dem-senator-on-closed-door-meetings.html
Or like how the Democrats "railroaded" Obamacare through a reconciliation process because they lost Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican (Scott Brown).
Obama used all his political capital to pass Obamacare over the objections of millions of Americans. He did so based on a foundation of lies: you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan, and the average family will save $2500 per year: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/521/cut-cost-typical-familys-health-insurance-premium-/
Democrats lost over 1000 political seats under Obama.