The fact that this is needed indicates the complete collapse of the
pubic skool system and Merkun Kolledges and univerities.
But as indicated by the discussions of "how to lie with statistics" on
this forum, it is badly needed.
No hoya zones are needed more than "safe rooms"
archer75--- via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
February 21, 2017 at 1:56 AM
Two University of Washington professors have assembled a course to
teach students to identify bullshit.
Biology professor Carl Bergstrom and assistant professor at the
university's Information School Jevin West have devised the “Calling
Bullshit in the Age of Big Data” course as their small contribution to
moving manure out of scholarly discourse.
Alas, they're not addressing politics, where they write the practice
of promulgating poo and manhandling manure reaches its apogee, but
they're swinging the shovel at a cause equally worthy: “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.”
Tugging strongly on The Register's heart-strings, they call out some
of the world's richest known sources of bullshit: “the TED talk you
watched last night … the latest New York Times or Washington Post
article fawning over some startup's big data analytics”.
We almost weep with joy to see them ask “Can you tell when a clinical
trial … is trustworthy, and when it is just a veiled press release for
some big pharma company?”
The syllabus will teach students how to spot the misuse of statistics,
how visualisation can mislead audiences, the use and abuse of big data
(with Weapons of Math Destruction as a supplementary reader, we note),
publication bias in science, and the ethics of calling bullshit (the
difference between “being a hard-minded skeptic and being a
domineering jerk”).
If you're not a student at the University of Washington, take heart:
once they've taught the single-credit course in the Spring 2017
quarter, they will post the lectures online.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/20/bullshit_detection_university_course/
---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
