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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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
"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.