There's still Hope! A real lecture for students in: "Calling Bullshit"

[cthulhu]

I know swearwords are not welcomed here, but this has nothing to do with a simple, swearing denial-attitude.
I found this programme and the website and i found it a very necessary subject and was very glad that something like this does exist.

This is about competence in reading media, tools and skills you nowadays must have to read the information surrounding you and not fall for plain Bullshit, that seems to be everywhere.

I find the use of the word "bullshit" here in this context so very appropriate and see it as a real scientific expression.

I have to think about my son, he is 17, and what and how he learns in school and how fast the society around us has changed regarding the level of information/misinformation/pure propaganda on all levels and the all-time ready mobile device and the dopamine-addicted use of it, a constant distractor and bullshit feeder. I was schocked when he told me he didn't know who Julian Assange was!

But to be aware of the bullshit around you you have to learn to detect and call it like it is, but what if even your teacher isn't aware of such bullshit and is forcing it into the pupils.

Here is a quote from the website to give you an idea, but you should visit the website and go through all of it and watch their very informative and also funny lectures on video.

https://callingbullshit.org/


"The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

What do we mean, exactly, by bullshit and calling bullshit? As a first approximation:

Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Calling bullshit is a performative utterance, a speech act in which one publicly repudiates something objectionable. The scope of targets is broader than bullshit alone. You can call bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call bullshit on lies, treachery, trickery, or injustice.

In this course we will teach you how to spot the former and effectively perform the latter.

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms — and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.

Of course an advertisement is trying to sell you something, but do you know whether the TED talk you watched last night is also bullshit — and if so, can you explain why? Can you see the problem with the latest New York Times or Washington Post article fawning over some startup's big data analytics? Can you tell when a clinical trial reported in the New England Journal or JAMA is trustworthy, and when it is just a veiled press release for some big pharma company?

Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.

Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West
Seattle, WA.


On the website they also have interactive courses you can take, like spotting if the picture is a photorealistic-cgi or a real photo of a person.
I thought i would get very easy into it, but my fault quote was more than 50%. This was really an eye-opener.
You can try it here:

http://whichfaceisreal.com/

But there is so much more to it, i will go through the whole programme.

This should be a duty to have in schools everywhere.

What do you think?

Do you also feel sourrounded by Bullshit and think that humanity is getting dumber and dumber every day? (Like in the movie Idiocrasy...)

And i just have to think about that maybe one could connect Watch and Learn to this whole topic...?

[cthulhu]

What exactly is bullshit anyway?

Surprising as it may seem, there has been considerable scholarly discussion about this exact question. Unsurprisingly given that scholars like to discuss it, opinions differ.

As a first approximation, we subscribe to the following definition:

Bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

It's an open question whether the term bullshit also refers to false claims that arise from innocent mistakes. 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. Some of the examples treated in our case studies fall into this domain. Even if not bullshit sensu stricto, we can nonetheless call bullshit on them.

In this course, we focus on bullshit as it often appears in the natural and social sciences: in the form of misleading models and data that drive erroneous conclusions.

[Master Ray]

Head = spinning a bit.  I'll be back to you on this one.   

[cthulhu]

Yes, please do. I don't know why your head is spinning though. Must have something to do with a bullshit overdose ;-)

I'm really like 'i have no idea' when it comes to the face-recognition test. I tried to apply the cues they gave and was looking for the markers, but mostly i had to go for the: "this one looks so fake-so it has to be real" descision, trying to compare the pictures psychologically like: "they put these two together to fool me, so the obvious fake one has to be the real one" but that should not be the case. And it is just not working for me.

I cannot decide between a fake cgi picture, radomly generated and a picture of a real human person!

[ldopas]

I would worry that the person trying to (pompously) "educate" us as to how to spot "bullshit" is ALWAYS pushing some sort of political agenda. People are not cattle, most people already have a bullshit detector.

So I would be concerned, especially as most educational establishments have some sort of political bias that this is another way to indoctrinate, quite the opposite of what they promise!

[cthulhu]

I can understand what you are saying there Idopas, but in this case i find the teachers and their program really helpful and useful.

So one example:

Bar chart axes should include zero

We begin with a well-known issue: drawing bar charts with a measurement (dependent variable) axis that does not go to zero. The bar chart was created by the German economic development agency GTAI, and comes from a webpage about the German labor market. In the accompanying text, the agency boasts that German workers are more motivated and work more hours than do workers in other EU nations.



It looks like Germany has a big edge over other nations such as Sweden, let alone France, right? No. The size of this gap is an illusion. The graph is misleading because the horizontal axis representing working hours does not go to zero, but rather cuts off at 36. Below, we've redrawn the graph with an axis going all the way to zero. Now the differences between countries seem negligible.




This one example shows that this information provided "Bar chart axes should include zero" helps you to see, that the chart above is used in a manipulating way. And that's the whole point.

Your statement i find a bit general. it is a good one to consider, but also the course of the teachers there can give you tools to read graphs with knowledge about graphs and their misuse.
So if an introcdinating person with a political agenda gives you a tool to spot tricks of persueing a political agenda and indoctrination, than i find it a good thing.

Does that make sense to you?

[Johnz]

I would worry that the person trying to (pompously) "educate" us as to how to spot "bullshit" is ALWAYS pushing some sort of political agenda. People are not cattle, most people already have a bullshit detector.

So I would be concerned, especially as most educational establishments have some sort of political bias that this is another way to indoctrinate, quite the opposite of what they promise!

They're probably somewhat left leaning, as you insinuate. But a lot of their stuff is actually pretty useful. My concern is more so that they are overly optimistic regarding the length people are willing to go to to detect deliberate misinformation. I think the real issue is not that people are easily fooled but that they are too willing to believe information that confirms their opinions. The rest just gets filtered out.

[cthulhu]

Very good observation and point there Johnz. That's why i find this programm so important, because it is for students and so part of their education and they will have to go all the lenghts. I think this kind of lecture should be part of normal education in schools.

My concern is that a new kind of generation has arisen that has forgotten how to think for themselves, and is a product of a society who is polluted by advertising, commercials and the neo-liberal doktrin which leads to a anti-social behaviour and way of thinking (the "market" has become a "being" and it is said to regulate everything, but this is just a smokescreen and has become almost a religion, because of course it is people who act and who are responsible for things happeneing, not the market) and these people are now in the places in the society which influence the other parts like teachers, journalists, officials and they re-produce a surface based, market compliant way of thinking, where no alternatives are allowed, a very indoctrinated, capitalist neo-liberal way of thinking and interpreting data.

It is no longer two different opinions exchanging their viewpoints in interest to find a common way but immediately they are totally antagonized and fight themselves. Everything has become more complex but at the same time everything has become so fast that most people feel they have no time to dig deeper into subjects.

[ldopas]

I would worry that the person trying to (pompously) "educate" us as to how to spot "bullshit" is ALWAYS pushing some sort of political agenda. People are not cattle, most people already have a bullshit detector.

So I would be concerned, especially as most educational establishments have some sort of political bias that this is another way to indoctrinate, quite the opposite of what they promise!

They're probably somewhat left leaning, as you insinuate. But a lot of their stuff is actually pretty useful. My concern is more so that they are overly optimistic regarding the length people are willing to go to to detect deliberate misinformation. I think the real issue is not that people are easily fooled but that they are too willing to believe information that confirms their opinions. The rest just gets filtered out.

Quite agree. There is a phrase for it: "Confirmation Bias".

[ldopas]

I can understand what you are saying there Idopas, but in this case i find the teachers and their program really helpful and useful.

Does that make sense to you?

Yep I do take your point. But it isn't really "bullshit" is it. It is the fact that someone presenting something to you is often very 1-D, whereas there are many other things that can affect what is being shown to you that are often hidden, cannot be effectively included or are willfully left out. I suspect that sometimes it is done to fool the reader, many times I suspect it is not done for deception but just for convenience, simplicity or news space.

[ldopas]

Very good observation and point there Johnz. That's why i find this programm so important, because it is for students and so part of their education and they will have to go all the lenghts. I think this kind of lecture should be part of normal education in schools.

My concern is that a new kind of generation has arisen that has forgotten how to think for themselves, and is a product of a society who is polluted by advertising, commercials and the neo-liberal doktrin which leads to a anti-social behaviour and way of thinking (the "market" has become a "being" and it is said to regulate everything, but this is just a smokescreen and has become almost a religion, because of course it is people who act and who are responsible for things happeneing, not the market) and these people are now in the places in the society which influence the other parts like teachers, journalists, officials and they re-produce a surface based, market compliant way of thinking, where no alternatives are allowed, a very indoctrinated, capitalist neo-liberal way of thinking and interpreting data.

It is no longer two different opinions exchanging their viewpoints in interest to find a common way but immediately they are totally antagonized and fight themselves. Everything has become more complex but at the same time everything has become so fast that most people feel they have no time to dig deeper into subjects.

This is an interesting post, and does back up I think some of what I said earlier. I talked about political bias and, no offence meant, you show it well here. Blaming the fact that a generation has "forgotten to think" on capitalism. Ironically it is the left that has the most to blame for people not thinking for themselves.

Don't forget the left likes to think it gives power back to people, but that is a complete and utter delusion, bullshit if you like!  The left is the political doctrine that governs from the centre with one creed that all must follow for the "common good", so all are "equal" with a state penalty (prison, privilege removal) for those who do not comply.

Capitalism, whether you like it or not, gives people the ability to think for themselves and it is that very fact that many do not like capitalism as it also allows people to fail which can be a problem, I get that as some people can be left behind. And I have many examples if you want me to quote them to back that up, but intelligent people like yourselves already know the examples I suspect if you care to think about it!

I can think of many pros and cons of the left and right, but accusing capitalism of people not thinking for themselves when it is a system that tacitly gives permission for people to do their own think; setting up SMEs, charities, marching to protest (which we have one every bloody week somewhere in this country) and so on, will not fly as an argument surely?

[cthulhu]

I understand what you're saying and what i didn't mean was my use of the word capitalism vs. communism. What i meant was maybe being commercial, selling out, staying on the surface, having no time, having no connections to the past.

So what i'm critisizing is a decline in the school-system, at least i can say that for germany. My son is 17 and what and how he is learning in school nowadays is way worse than it was in my time and in my time it already was bullshit;-)

I don't know. i had problems in school, not because i didn't want to learn but because i did want to learn, go deeper, ask questions. I mean if not asking questions in school than what it is about? But school has become almost only about performance and reciting what the teacher said, and the teacher has to say what is in the curriculum.

Your points about the left, well i do get them. I kind of changed my view about that subject recently, because there are some things going on here in germany which maybe can look good on the surface, but when you dig deeper than it's bullshit. With the Fridays for Future thing going on and the Green Party rushing towards government you could say, finally! The good things come up. But here in germany it was with the socialist party and the green party who decided to go to war (Jugoslawia) for the first time after WW2 and the slogan "never ever war again" was just forgotten.
Here we now talk about more restrictions for the people to save the earth and save the climate, but no one is talking about how much the military-industrial-complex is polluting everything, and its green politicians who pose in uniforms of the army and are pro military adventures. So the left here for me has discredited itself for me very much. And many people who call themselves left are just repeating and reciting things they don't understand, but they do it because they have a bad conscience which is more forced by the left.

I just don't get it.

But i still have the feeling that we both talk about different subjects. I see this programme just as a tool, which helps to think for yourself and interpret data with your own mind.
I think you mostly refer to the tilte and the emotional aspect of the word "bullshit" as being somethimng that could hide an agenda. But what if you could detect that agenda by using the tools given by them?

[Johnz]

Very good observation and point there Johnz. That's why i find this programm so important, because it is for students and so part of their education and they will have to go all the lenghts. I think this kind of lecture should be part of normal education in schools.

My concern is that a new kind of generation has arisen that has forgotten how to think for themselves, and is a product of a society who is polluted by advertising, commercials and the neo-liberal doktrin which leads to a anti-social behaviour and way of thinking (the "market" has become a "being" and it is said to regulate everything, but this is just a smokescreen and has become almost a religion, because of course it is people who act and who are responsible for things happeneing, not the market) and these people are now in the places in the society which influence the other parts like teachers, journalists, officials and they re-produce a surface based, market compliant way of thinking, where no alternatives are allowed, a very indoctrinated, capitalist neo-liberal way of thinking and interpreting data.

It is no longer two different opinions exchanging their viewpoints in interest to find a common way but immediately they are totally antagonized and fight themselves. Everything has become more complex but at the same time everything has become so fast that most people feel they have no time to dig deeper into subjects.

As a scientist (possibly the most despised life-form after Christians in these parts) I mostly despair these days when I see how information is exchanged. Rational analytical thinking has gone out of the window and truth is nice if it backs up your agenda, otherwise it is disposable. Science itself (or more so the way that it's communicated) is partly to blame for this but that is another topic. altogether.

So, yes I think that sites like this one are very important. I know that many people no longer feel that 'bullshit' matters much anymore (because everything is bullshit anyway...) but that is a very dangerous road to go down and it will come to bit us in the arse.

[cthulhu]

  Science itself (or more so the way that it's communicated) is partly to blame for this but that is another topic. altogether.  

Very good thought again and i would like to discuss that here. I think it fits very good here and i will come back to that later, i am only with my mobile for some days to come and writing wirh it is kind of frustrating.

until then i want to throw in some good lyrics about that matter:

system of a down - science

Making two possibilities a reality,
Predicting the future of things we all know,
Fighting off the diseased programming
Of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries

Science fails to recognize the single most
Potent element of human existence
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding
Is faith, faith, faith, faith

Science has failed our world
Science has failed our Mother Earth

Science fails to recognize the single most
Potent element of human existence
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding
Is faith, faith, faith, faith

Science has failed our world
Science has failed our Mother Earth.
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things,
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things…

what you think abou that?

[Johnz]

  Science itself (or more so the way that it's communicated) is partly to blame for this but that is another topic. altogether.   

Very good thought again and i would like to discuss that here. I think it fits very good here and i will come back to that later, i am only with my mobile for some days to come and writing wirh it is kind of frustrating.

until then i want to throw in some good lyrics about that matter:

system of a down - science

I could write a lot about this. That song is a very good example of what I mean. What I get from it is that science may have the answers but what good does that do if people just believe what they feel is right anyway (based on easily manipulated feelings/opinions/faith/spirit whatever you want to call it). That’s probably not how it’s meant but the result is the same.
Science is a method of answering questions by trying to remove your own feelings and preconceptions and let the facts speak for themselves. It's actually very humble because it’s honest about its short comings, it's happy to admit failure and it appreciates criticism. All because these are factors that improve the actual science.

A good way to look at science is to use the western legal system as an analogy. You have an accused (your hypothesis), your evidence (data) and your peer reviewers (judge, jury and attorneys). You present your data to the best of your ability and interpret it based on current knowledge. Since you know that you don’t know everything you team up with other experts that can provide valuable input. You then let your fiercest opponents rip it to shreds and start again until you can present the best possible results. As in law, these results are not always clear cut and are open to interpretation and therefore misjudgment. Just as the public often don’t understand the crucial difference between ‘not proven guilty’ and ‘innocent’, they also don’t understand the difference between ‘the results show no…’ and ‘there is no…’. This is where science communication often falls short. Summarising complex subjects into 30 second titbits of information that can give a clear yes or no answer is a huge part of the problem.  So, yes, law and science often get it wrong but on balance it is the most objective method to base these decisions on. And what would the alternative be? Somebody judging you because their opinion/feeling tells them you’re guilty/wrong? There is a lot of that happening in the world right now and it’s not going to get less anytime soon.

The whole polarisation of science vs. art/spirituality is really a non-entity. They are not mutually exclusive. Science follows an urge for knowledge and truth just like art does but on a different level. I know there are many science sceptics around here (lead by our own JS. Ha!). I find that whenever I have the science debate it usually ends in the same arguments, most of which boil down to ‘why bother with science when you can just use common sense’. Sadly, nothing is less common than common sense and you quickly end up with a bunch of, often completely contradictory, opinions. The other argument is usually something like animal testing or the nuclear bomb. Truly despicable things, no doubt, but it’s a bit like saying I don’t like art because of Justin Bieber. Science needs to be responsible (just like art does) but beyond that it needs no justification beyond your desire to practice it (just like art doesn’t). And if you think your art has no impact or fulfils no need, why bother? I often feel that science is really just a great misunderstood artform. I went to school in England and Germany and have never been taught the philosophy of science. Sure, I was taught scientific subjects, but they were always presented as facts that needed to be learned. The notion that science is a living, breathing, ever-changing and exciting method to find the best possible truth for a particular question at a particular time and the beauty and satisfaction of searching for and finding logic is rarely taught it seems.

Ok, so I did write a lot about this… 😊

PS. If you have the time and inclination, read The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.