Course correct on misinformation
The world, according to University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, is awash in BS.
So begins their popular course, “Calling Bulls--t,” which trains university students to identify and call out misinformation. BS warps voter choices. It can damage businesses. BS oozed from a crudely edited video that falsely suggested U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was inebriated at a public event. Foreign propaganda machines spread BS through social and news media during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond. And BS, when it clouds the science of vaccine safety and global warming, even threatens our health. Many people believe the BS they encounter and transmit it further — and that’s what this class aims to stop.
Bergstrom and West developed the syllabus as a corrective to the widespread problem of BS, and they made it easy to distribute to other teachers and students. More than 70 universities have contacted them to use course materials.
“It’s the way that technology has exploded that has really scaled up the amount of information and the amount of BS and how much we’re required to filter,” said Carrie Diaz Eaton, a professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, who tweaked the syllabus to work in statistics in the programming language R.
The class focuses on a pernicious form of misinformation that can be especially misleading: the kind that comes cloaked in data and figures.
“We grant this unwarranted authority to numbers. Numbers feel hard and crisp and sort of unquestionable,” said Bergstrom, a computational biologist. “We wanted to show our students that you don’t have to have a master’s degree in statistics or computer science to be able to call bulls--t on this stuff.”
A right-wing media site, for example, blared in a headline that several thousand DACA beneficiaries (undocumented children shielded from deportation by an Obama-era policy) have committed crimes against U.S. citizens, Bergstrom said. “But it’s an extremely low percentage of DACA recipients,” he pointed out. “Which means they’re being accused of crimes at substantially lower rates — massively lower rates — than American citizens. Of course the article doesn’t say that.”
The course includes training in practical skills, with no advanced mathematical knowledge required. West and Bergstrom said they have taught defence against BS to librarians and to highschoolers, who “love calling bulls--t on adults,” Bergstrom observed.
The class teaches students a true thing can be BS. Whole Foods sells a product advertised as “non-GMO” Himalayan pink salt, to pluck an example from the course’s @Callin_bull Twitter account. But that is BS, because salt, a mineral, doesn’t have any genes to modify.
West was a graduate student in Bergstrom’s laboratory more than a decade ago, and they have written numerous research papers about patterns in how scientists publish their work, including the observation that male scientists cite themselves far more frequently than female scientists self-cite.
Meanwhile, they increasingly saw misinformation in their lives outside work. “When we had print media, the stuff that we consumed was predominantly filtered through professional editors,” Bergstrom said. But social media has made all of us “the gatekeepers of what’s worth seeing for our colleagues, our friends and our families.”
Their website includes tools to disarm BS. Here are a few: Bar charts, but not necessarily line graphs, should include zero on their axes; there’s no guarantee a scientific paper is correct, but publication in a well-known and peer-reviewed journal is a sign the research was legitimate; computers can generate realistic human faces but algorithms struggle with hair, backgrounds and symmetrical glasses.
Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an influential 1986 essay, “On Bulls--t,” in which he theorized that BS is distinct from a lie. Truth and falsehood are beside the point of BS, Frankfurt concluded. Its purveyor means to persuade. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” he wrote. “Producing bulls--t requires no such conviction.”
When registration opened for the first “Calling Bulls--t” class, in the spring semester of 2017, its 160 seats filled in under a minute, West said.
They are developing an open online course, and they have shared their lessons in public events. Studies have shown that those vulnerable to sharing misinformation online are older than 65 and disproportionately conservative.
Carol Harding, a recent Bates College senior who majored in political science, took Diaz Eaton’s course last fall.
Diaz Eaton asked her students to combat misinformation they’d encountered in the community. Harding chose to examine the “characterization, in Maine, of Lewiston being particularly dangerous.” Which, she knew, was false.
The city, Maine’s second most populous, has a high percentage of Somali refugees. There have been problems with hate speech on campus, Diaz Eaton said, and Lewiston’s mayor resigned after his racist text messages leaked.
Harding was enrolled in a class run by Lewiston police officers, which gave her access to local crime statistics. She produced several graphs showing the reality of crime in Lewiston: from 1985 to 2017, rates decreased in the city. Twentythree other cities and towns in Maine have higher crime rates. “Twenty-fourth is pretty good for one of the largest cities in Maine,” Diaz Eaton said. “I mean, there’s not that many cities in Maine.”
She printed anti-BS flyers, with a visualization of the crime rates, and passed them out around campus. Her fellow students received them with surprise. The local police station liked her graphics so much that it asked for a copy.
Hers was the kind of thoughtful correction West and Bergstrom want to promote. “There are facts out there that exist,” West said. “We’re not trying to create, you know, a new generation of nihilists.”