All I can say is…it’s about time!!!
From Open Culture, a wonderful site that provides free links to almost everything and anything of interest on the internet. I get their daily email offers, and I cannot begin to tell you how much wonderful information…info that I would never have found despite being an intensely curious searcher for many decades…has come to me through that site
Two professors at the University of Washington, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, have created a website meant to accompany a potential college seminar entitled “Calling Bullshit.” Here’s how Bergstrom and West explain the premise of their course. It’s worth quoting them at length.
Calling Bullshit
In the Age of Big Data
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 the term bullshit? As a first approximation, 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.
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…
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.
And their lovely disclaimer(s):
Disclaimer: Calling Bullshit has been developed by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West to meet what we see as a major need in higher education nationwide. We have proposed this course for future inclusion in the course catalog at the University of Washington. At present, however, Calling Bullshit is not an official course, nor is it otherwise endorsed by the University of Washington.
Yet Another Disclaimer: This website is intended for personal educational use and should be used for informational purposes only. Accordingly, all warranties and forms of liability from your use of this website are disclaimed to the extent applicable in your jurisdiction. Nothing on this website constitutes guaranteed accuracy of any kind. Calls of bullshit represent the opinions of the instructors and are not intended as definitive judgements of fact. Callingbullshit.org is not liable for any loss of credulity you may suffer as a consequence of reading the information herein. Viewer discretion advised. May cause drowsiness. Void where prohibited. No animals were used during testing. May cause excitability. Not recommended for children under the age of 12. Use only as directed. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. Live, except on West Coast. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while using this website. Additional taxes may apply in some jurisdictions. Individual results may vary. Not to be used with alcoholic beverages. I bet you think this website is about you, don’t you? Don’t you?
Gotta love it.
They are of course totally on point. The bullshit quotient has been rapidly growing in U.S. culture for decades, and with most of it there was at least an attempt to disguise it as the truth. We have reached a new level now, where there is so much bullshit so easily disseminated that some of the more gifted bullshit artists have simply stopped trying to disguise it.
This is the real secret of the Trump/Alt. Right/Alt. Facts movement’s astounding success. While the old bullshit culture tried to dress its bullshit up in fancy clothes…The NY TImes being a prime example of the genre and something of a pioneer in the field, as has been the Democratic Party at least since Clinton I…the impetus behind the New Bullshit movement is very simple. A number of longtime professional bullshitters realized that there were now enough totally credulous, media-blinded people that they no longer needed to disguise the bullshit. In fact, those credulous many are actually offended by the dressing up. They’d rather take their bullshit straight up and smoking from whatever scheming ass wants to shit on them.
WWE style.
Plus…not disguising it makes it much cheaper to promulgate, thus the Trump campaign’s ability to win while spending much less money than the all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go HRC campaign. You just put the bullshit out there unadorned and watch the rubes flock to stomp their feet in it and yell “HUZZZAH!!!”
The Twitterverse, in a word.
Free bullshit promulgation for all!!!
Bullshit equality. For free!!!
And now here we are with a new preznit.
Our very own Tweetzident:
Preznit Tweety Bird!!!
Ain’t he cute, Hilda!!!
Like dat.
The reality?
Like dat, too.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
