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Calling bullshit

callingbullshit.org

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Re: Calling bullshit

#11

Post by natural_capital »

I really like this idea, though struggle to understand the effectiveness.

My guess is that the type of person who falls victim to 'bullshit' theory or messages is not the kind of person who is willing to dedicate time to an online course about learning to be more critical in thought. 'Bullshit' thinking has been largely successful because its an effortless pathway to establishing an opinion on something (queue System 1/System 2 thinking).

Conversely, the people who would be willing to read this sort of content are likely the people who are already reasonable skeptical about what they take as face value.

Re: Calling bullshit

#12

Post by fiatjaf »

This is a course on being intelligent, it seems. If you are able to teach people how to be intelligent without making them actually intelligent (= to know a lot of things) then it is magic.

Re: Calling bullshit

#15

Post by dhimes »

natural_capital wrote: post #11

I really like this idea, though struggle to understand the effectiveness. My guess is that the type of person who falls victim to 'bullshit' theory or messages is not the kind of person who is willing to dedicate time to an online course about learning to be more critical in thought. 'Bullshit' thinking has been largely successful because its an effortless pathway to establishing an opinion on something (queue System…

This is a good point. It's like half of the course needs to be about how to talk about bullshit in a way that makes more people want to get aboard the anti-bullshit train.

Re: Calling bullshit

#16

Post by ThomPete »

kornakiewicz wrote: post #6

I wish this kind of courses were mandatory for all undergraduates in our post-truth era.

Can we stop with the claims about a post-truth era?

It's not like people suddenly decided to disregard truth and not believe in actual truths.

It's that we have just realized that interpretation is not the same as truth and have now been made aware that there are other interpretations of the facts than our own.

We don't live in a post-truth world, we live in a world were the truth is confused with difference of opinion.

Re: Calling bullshit

#17

Post by a_humean »

t_g wrote: post #14

Reminds me of a good book I read in my ethics classes: https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

Yep, its one of the best essays I read during my undergrad, and in the era of Trump's never ending bullshit generation it has never been a more relevant a topic for study. 16 page PDF of the original article:

https://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf

And Cohen's "Deeper into Bullshit":

http://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/robert.tierney/phil1301-6/b...

edit: now that the site is back up, I can see both are part of the week 1 syllabus!

Re: Calling bullshit

#18

Post by placebo »

dccoolgai wrote: post #10

Yes. Bullshit is ruining everything. There needs to be some kind of grassroots movement to stop it.

You need to want to know what is true first, to care enough to take the trouble of knowing how to detect bullshit. I think the reason why bullshit is flourishing is because those that actually give a damn are the minority. The majority is composed of the useful idiots and those that manipulate them. Of course reality is never black and white, and it is much more nuanced than I've stated here, but I think that's the general gist of things

Re: Calling bullshit

#19

Post by simonbarker87 »

natural_capital wrote: post #11

I really like this idea, though struggle to understand the effectiveness. My guess is that the type of person who falls victim to 'bullshit' theory or messages is not the kind of person who is willing to dedicate time to an online course about learning to be more critical in thought. 'Bullshit' thinking has been largely successful because its an effortless pathway to establishing an opinion on something (queue System…

I think everyone, engaged and skeptical or otherwise can miss falsehoods if it aligns with their values/beliefs already. Taking something like this should, in theory, give you tools to make sure that even if you really want to believe what you are reading/hearing because it aligns with your world view (or worse, comes from a source you respect and trust) then you can still determine how honest or accurate it is.
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