Calling Bullshit 2.1: Spotting Bullshit
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 เม.ย. 2017
- Jevin discusses some ways to spot bullshit and challenges students to tell whether four nuggets of wisdom from the internet are true or bullshit.
Course: INFO 198 / BIOL 106B. University of Washington
Instructors: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West
Synopsis: Our world is saturated with bullshit. Learn to detect and defuse it.
The course will be offered as a 1-credit seminar this spring through the Information School at the University of Washington. We aim to expand it to a 3 or 4 credit course for 2017-2018. For those who cannot attend in person, we aim to videotape the lectures this spring and make video clips freely available on the web.
callingbullshit.org
/ callin_bull
callinBS
bullsht.course@gmail.com
Information School ischool.uw.edu/
Department of Biology www.biology.washington.edu/
Video edited by Bum Mook Oh
Music by Chris Zabriskie: Prelude No.7
The two students who didn't change their wrong answer could get an additional credit for unflinching honesty.
5:03 -- The wording can be very important. The number of people who "get injured by their toilets" is likely to be quite different from the number of people who "get injured on their toilets." Indeed the people he was referring to were injured on their toilets, but not by their toilets.
This is one of the ways valid information can quickly transform into bullshit: careless wording.
thank you for this. We need it so much especially now in Tunisia.
I see the numbers change--what is the point of that, folks? "Oh, it's true. Well, then, I'll take your word for it and change my vote to 'Not Bullshit'." This, even after he has told them it won't affect their status in the course. What does this say about the people voting?
What might be a great idea (and maybe you do this later in the series?) is, after they take their initial guesses, start giving some information relevant to the question. Quote statistics, cite sources, etc. Then the shifts in votes would be interesting and meaningful.
people want to be right and avoid mistakes
this is why they correct it
@4:03 - I normally would remain silent but as this is a tutorial on calling BS the explanation for why the valsalva maneuver causes toiled injuries is slightly misguided. While it is true that the first phase of the valsalva maneuver does transiently increase mean aortic pressure, it is the compensatory low pressure state (hypotension) which causes cerebral hypo perfusion (low blood flow to the brain) which then causes unconsciousness (after which time people may often fall and hit their head). Everything else about this video is spot on and awesome though. I hope that this will not be received in any way as a criticism
How do we square the portion leading up to 3:12 with ad hominem fallacies? Is it the difference between convincing oneself and convincing others?
NB incorrect description of the Valsalva manoeuvre.
Something that came to mind watching this is as a regular person who is trying to find answers, where can I go to get them if I'm not a scientist in a lab or something like that? My primary resource for research is the internet and I will be looking for an answer to a question and get several different answers to the one question. It makes me skeptical and lose trust in the value of using the internet as a legitimate source for researching questions. Students in school use the internet for books reports and things like that when they used to have to go to the public library. Bottom line: How can you even find out for certain if something is true or not?
Even this was 9 months ago i would like to answer from my perspective:
The best approach for me is to build a repertoire of News sources you trust to actually seek the truth and make sure they dont make unsubstantiated claims but include their sources in or under the article and dont be afraid to check wether the sources are accurately represented from time to time. So even when you dont check the sources in every article you can trust them because the sources checked out the last 5 times. (For me examples are The Intercept, The Guardian, ...)
It also doesnt mean that you have to regularly read all of them - just that you can turn to them when you want to search for something specific.
Then check those News sites for whatever you want to know - Keep in mind it is possible they get some things wrong and a lot of stuff is opinion rather than fact, but it is less likely all of them are wrong).
Also weed out News sites that do good journalism but mix in some misinformation or propaganda campaigns because it is hard to tell which one it is this time (RT etc.) or at least cross-check them with sources you trust if you are not sure.
News sources that are known for mostly doing Bullshit etc. should be dismissed immediately (Breitbart, Fox News etc.). They are not worth any of your time. All they do is throw Bullshit at you to see what sticks. If articles link to them as sources without questioning or pointing them out the same applies to those.
Next it is a concern this creates sort of a filter bubble especially when you allow algorithms to play their role in this so you should always try to build a more diverse repertoire of News sources and seek them out directly BUT you should not fall for the trap of neutrality for its own sake. Sometimes there is just one side to a story and you shouldnt turn to untrustworthy sources just to get an opposing view.
Btw. when you do search for News try to keep the topic and terms as broad as possible and switch them up a bit because the terms you use have a massive impact on the results you see ("Illegal Immigrants" or "economic refugees" are an example of such loaded terms) and dont just rely on the first results.
On issues I really care about I find more specific reputable sources I turn to first like the IPCC on climate change or Science TH-camrs with a record of making reasonable arguments and who show their sources.
I hope this could be of some help. I have to admit I am not that stringent in following those rules myself and find myself way too often not checking sources etc. and just believing facts because they confirm my assumption.
Can they still switch opinon on pizza gate and Epstine and not call it a BS?
i have had 3 friends hurt themselves... One fainted fell off...
One lost balance landed wrong ...
and Then the last well Tore himself a new one..
in the previous lecture he says calling bullshit is a performative utterance and by their nature are neither true nor false - they can be either felicitous or infelicitous. So why does he ask his students in the toilet stat example whether this is true or false? He is bullshitting them
Can a claim be bullshit even if it's true? Many of these Facebook memes were making claims without any kind of citation, leaving us with no way to easily check their veracity. As the saying goes, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I would say that, yes, even true claims can be bullshit.
For the vast majority of claims, that are shared in an image-meme format, I would say they are bullshit. While the image may be created by a person honestly trying to convey accurate information, most of the people sharing it afterwards, just share it because they think it is cool or fun, or because they agree with the message, without any regard for whether it is actually true.
I would disagree with the toilet claim not being bullshit. To equate bullshit with lies misses a very important fact: The aim of bullshit is often not to convince one way or the other, but to confuse, and to elicit behavior. The addition of "you should be careful around toilets" turns this from a declarative statement ("this many people get injured on the toilet") which can either be true or false, into an argument ("IF this many people are injured by toilets THEN you should be careful around toilets"). While the first part of the conditional may be true, the second one requires context in order to evaluate, and it's there that the bullshit might creep in.
3:22 I disagree and feel obliged to call Bullshit because that is an overall trend that makes me furious.
By giving the explanation at 4:03 why it is not Bullshit it seems to me you are actually saying it is not an outright lie and not wether the statement is bullshit.
My understanding as established in previous videos is that wether sth is a lie or not is not as important as the disregard for truth when defining bullshit.
The way that statement is worded does exactly that. "Noone tells you ..." is Bullshit just like "What 'the media' doesnt tell you ..." etc. or at least it sets a really high bar for not being bullshit.
If you would ask people if they could imagine that people get injured while using the toilet (or because of?) and wether 30,000 would be a reasonable number, most people would probably say "yes now that you mention it I can imagine that to be true" ... but when noone tells you that fact, it is usually because noone asked - It is not being omitted or actively suppressed. You could probably look it up in public statistics if you were really invested in the pursuit of that question (Maybe because that is your reasearch topic) but it is not a fact that is in the interest of the public to know so it is not surprising that "noone" reports on it disregarding that usually "Noone" actually means "Not many" and by telling me in fact Someone (YOU) is telling me right now.
The fact you want to communicate would be just as true or false without that introduction. If anything that makes the whole statement less truthful as I just laid out above.
"Noone tells you..." displays that disregard for truth because its only aim is to make the fact more interesting/shocking/... by pretending that the fact is surprising, out of the ordinary and should be reported on but isn't. There may be such cases (thus the high bar) but more often than not it is just bullshit and with a fairly trivial fact like this I dont feel the need to check wether it is actually a lie or not to call bullshit.
On top of all that "Be careful in the bathroom" pretends this is somehow a significant thing people should worry about when 30k people is not even 0.01 % of the American population and I want to make an educated guess here that almost every American uses the bathroom at least once a year. I checked www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm real quick and that sais way more than 100Million doctors' + emergency room visits are due to injuries so that still leaves ut at way less than 0.1% of documented injuries. That is not something I would concern myself when I go to the toilet.
*That statement is Bullshit on top of Bullshit.*
Sry I had to get that incoherent rant off my chest. Anyway I still love this educational effort. Education on Bullshit media/science and critical thinking should play a way bigger role all the way from preschool to university. So keep doing this and I am off to continue watching the series. :)
I would disagree with this quiz, since the working definition for bullshit is a "disregard" for the truth. Under that definition, something can be both _bullshit and true_ the same way that a broken analog clock is right twice a day. To require bullshit to be false would mean that it had regard for the truth in order to avoid it.
In every single example, it's clearly bullshit because it lacks clarifying details, a claim of authorship, a cited source of the statistic, or absolutely anything else that might remotely suggest that it wasn't invented out of thin air by a 12-year-old.
Unfortunately the lecturer is full of it. Why is he asking his students to determine the truth/falsity of a claim without investigating the facts before calling something BS. Shouldn't they be finding the truth first then calling BS after ; not call BS then find out if its claim is true?
6:49 still bullshit, there are more than four modifications of carbon. whether you count all the different fullerenes and CNTs as one modification or not, you have at least five modifications. and you could argue, that ›diamond‹ is a substance, not an object: you do not say ›millions of graphites‹ or ›millions of sodium chlorides‹. therefore: yes, the flame contains diamond…or millions of diamond nanoparticles or crystals. you also could call this bullshit for thousand of years, even if its actually true, because for a long time this was an unfunded claim. Therefore, Hitchens’ Razor would not leave a lot left.