University offers course to help sniff out and refute 'bullshit'

[Jimbo101]

engadget.com

Not only is fake news everywhere, but its purveyors call genuine news fake, making it doubly hard for the average person to know what's real and what's Inception. For example, President Donald Trump recently made up a terrorist attack in Sweden, and when the nation's former PM called bullshit, he said the refutation itself was "fake news." Luckily, 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. The 160-seat class filled up within minutes of being posted, but it will be videotaped and possibly made "freely available" on the web, the listing says. The syllabus details all 12 lectures, with links to the (free) reading materials in case you want to audit the class in a serious way.

[scscholar]

1. They admit a CONservative bias with ""both sides of the aisle"

That's not true. I have never seen our side do that.