'Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/16/calling-bullshit-college-class-news-information

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

99 93 7 years ago

I suggest that 'calling bullshit' on just about everything pushed by corporate news is a good idea, including the Guardian. 'Question everything' is a good approach to assessing information from all sources. Just because an entity presents itself as a 'news source' doesn't mean that information is accurate or unbiased. 'Who benefits' and finding out the facts are key to navigating our information choked world in my opinion...particularly the facts that aren't 'reported'...

ptah• 7 years ago

guardian is owned by a trust https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/15/support-g...

olivermarks6• 7 years ago

Aware of that, I try to find out who owns the big media titles and what their agendas are

tomschlick• 7 years ago

'Question everything' is a good approach

Agreed. I would trust a reporter who says they don't have any bias when reporting less than one who does and makes it known. Example: If you're a liberal viewpoint reporter, be honest about it. Same with conservative. That way I know which other viewpoints to seek out to verify / counterbalance with.

matt40773• 7 years ago

Great. That way you have absolutely no basis to make any decision on.

It’s utterly impossible to verify even a tiny bit of the information you rely on every day from first principle. If you don’t find some way to establish trust, you’re almost literally lost in the wilderness (if you include Google Maps and all map makers in your “trust no one” shtick).

roenxi• 7 years ago

I'd put it to you that ignoring information in the media and living life based on what is going on in your immediate community would be a surprisingly effective strategy.

There is an interesting debate over the morality of that lifestyle. It could easily be a net improvement over the current equilibrium of large, coordinated tribal groups. A thing is not automatically good by virtue of being supported by a large group.

For example, someone ignoring the print media would have missed decades of turned-out-to-be-inaccurate dietary advice.

hammock4• 7 years ago

It’s utterly impossible to verify even a tiny bit of the information you rely on every day from first principle.

Does it matter? If you resolve always to ACT from first principle, and put your trust in God, why worry about who is lying to you and who is not? Would you treat a liar with less compassion? Would you question God's plan?

ovi2563• 7 years ago

This is a stated goal of Russian anti-Western propaganda. Spread the narrative that all news outlets are equally untrustworthy, and that Western news consumers cannot ever be informed.

NATO and the EU have started anti-fake-news efforts to combat this narrative. It was all over EU facebook ads a while ago.

coldtea9• 7 years ago

Great. That way you have absolutely no basis to make any decision on.

No basis is better than a bad basis. At least you're not duped into thinking you have a basis.

It’s utterly impossible to verify even a tiny bit of the information you rely on every day from first principle.

Doesn't have to be "first principles" (no need to reinvent math for example).

Tons of informations we rely on can be verified quite easily with a little personal effort, and some good foundational reading on undisputed stuff (like mathematics, physics, biology, and so on).

For example, you don't need to become a doctor to not be duped by BS fad diets pushed by the media -- you just need to know enough nutrition basics, easily doable (and useful in itself).

And if something (e.g. fracking) is important for you, you can study the literature (starting with books, including university handbooks -- not internet posts, not articles, and not mere scientific papers of random research on the matter), talk to some experts directly (it's not impossible, I've talked with experts in lots of different matters), talk to people in communities nearby, affected, etc, and draw your own conclusions.

BeetleB• 7 years ago

"Question everything" doesn't mean never accept anything. It means not to take it at face value. It means "Check if you can get independent corroboration". And it's not literal. I'm sure he does trust map makers.

People in my life have ended up in the national news for various reasons. The first time it happened was the first time I really read the news heavily. You learn a lot from doing that:

Plenty of clearly wrong reporting. I say "clearly" from a personal perspective - I knew the people involved, and knew details about their lives that the news just plain got wrong. This wasn't malice - it was sloppiness. The interesting thing is that once one major news organization reports it incorrectly, others follow suit. In a few cases, some of the smaller (regional) news outfits actually got the details right.

When you see that happen in front of you, then of course you'll be skeptical of whatever else you see on the news. And it's not trivial to corroborate from multiple sources, as they often copy from one another and invest very little in independent fact checking.

The corollary is:

When a story isn't big enough (e.g. it gets only one news story and isn't stretched out over time), you really should just ignore it, as you have no way to verify the information.

If you examine the news a lot, you'll realize that for most stories, there is little incentive to get the details right - especially if there aren't powerful counterforces. If the NY Times decides to write a sloppy story against Apple, then Apple is big enough to counter. And even if they didn't counter, other news agencies will have an incentive to counter.

Of if you have a story on a polarizing topic, you can expect pushback and fact checking.

But when you have a story about someone who isn't famous getting arrested for some misdeed, and even if it becomes national news, likely no one will call out sloppy reporting - as long as it is not a polarizing issue. And most news stories are one-offs.

Consultant32452• 7 years ago

There's a short list of things the news media get right, and a few anti-patterns they use which imo intentionally confuse.

The major media outlets are pretty good at providing transcripts or video of events. They are terrible at summarizing. If there's a news headline that someone said/did something that seems outlandish, 9/10 they didn't say/do that, or what they said makes perfect sense in context (Recent example: A major politician is not going to publicly support infanticide). Always read/watch the source material, preferably from multiple sources because the media will tend to edit out context (recent example: Covington kids). If I can't be bothered to read/watch the source material, then the alleged story wasn't important enough for me to be upset. I can behave as if I'd never even heard of such a thing.

Never believe unattributed/anonymous statements. You should assume any quote that does not have a real person's name attributed to it is a lie. Sometimes it will be true, but not often enough to matter. If it is true, and it's a concern of actual importance, real evidence will surface eventually. Wait for this to actually happen.

Always assume statements made by officials in the lying industry is a lie. That's NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc. The media tends to report, "X official said Y" in such a way that we're supposed to assume Y is a fact now. But the media is almost never critical of these statements and there is often on supporting evidence provided. If it's not important enough to potentially reveal secret techniques by showing me the evidence, it's not a big enough deal for me to care what you said about it. I'm not anti-CIA/NSA/etc. but I understand their role is sometimes to lie to me in order to further some greater agenda like promoting a war effort.

Unless there's a world changing event going on right now, like 9/11 scale world changing event, avoid 24 hour and even daily news. These outlets are drug dealers, selling you an outrage high. Weekly news sources are much better. If a story isn't important enough to make it into the weekly news, it probably wasn't worth spending time on in the first place. Also, being a weekly publication means more of the story has unfolded, and the corrections are more likely to already be baked in. In the 24 hour news cycle, the outrage hot-take gets spread around, and then nobody ever sees the correction/retraction.

hirundo• 7 years ago

Argumentum ad hominem / trust is not the only way to evaluate the truth of statements.

chriswarbo• 7 years ago

I agree in principle, but there has to be a balance. Nobody can be an expert in everything, many things in the real world are hard or impossible to verify for ourselves, etc. so we need some amount of trust in those we get information from.

I would hope this caveat is obvious, but unfortunately such "question everything" narratives are also commonly spewed by antivaxxers, flat earthers, the alt-right, etc. alongside the classic "do some research".

I think this is summed up nicely by "skepticism doesn't mean denial", or the more pithy "don't open your mind so much that your brain falls out".

carnagii• 7 years ago

The problem with "objective" journalism is that truth and falsehood are not as important as what the objective of the story is. If a propagandist can use the truth to achieve their objectives that is better than lies because people can detect lies easier. Objective journalism is based on the false premise that reporting facts differentiates you from agenda driven propaganda when it is really just the most effective form of agenda driven propaganda.

seppin2• 7 years ago

Question everything' is a good approach to assessing information from all sources

No it's not. Questioning climate science at a time where the consensus is near-universal and the consequences are dire and imminent is itself destructive. You need to question what doesn't make sense or isn't supported by evidence, and believe the rest.

weberc2• 7 years ago

including the Guardian

especially the Guardian.

troyvit• 7 years ago

Something tells me that college is not where this class belongs.

java-man2• 7 years ago

you are right, we need to teach our kids about bullshit much earlier.

ravenstine• 7 years ago

We all keep saying that. So how do we get the ball rolling?

49para• 7 years ago

but then they might not go to college at all.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

As someone who has the "enlightening" experience of getting his high-school education in multiple states and took note of the "inconveniences" in history and science that each state chose not to focus on or downplay I assure you that an education system that at the end of the day answers to government is not going to eagerly teach the population how to detect bullshit.

monksy2• 7 years ago

This is absolutely reasonable for a university level class.

It would go over:

1. Rhetoric

2. Historical methods of propaganda

3. How propaganda spreads

4. "Virality in communication networks" (https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc...)

5. Gossip

6. Tactics of Manipulation (48 laws of power is a good recording of this)

7. Strategizing on cognitive basis.

thedoctor79• 7 years ago

Sir — A. J. Tatem and colleagues calculate that women may out-sprint men by the middle of the twenty-second century (Nature 431,525; 2004). They omit to mention, however, that (according to their analysis) a far more interesting race should occur in about 2636, when times of less than zero seconds will be recorded.

This analysis fails to account for the prediction that in early 27th century FTL speeds will be achievable and a woman would invent a relativistic shoe that would allow here to wind the 100 meters dash.

gambler2• 7 years ago

"Calling Bullshit is not dedicated to teaching students that Fox News promotes “fake news” or that National Enquirer headlines are fallacious."

Oh, the irony. An article about college class that teaches people to spot bad information online is itself full of standard techniques journalists use to manipulate people.

I see this one a lot lately. Someone drops a phrase that assumes something the author wants readers to remember and believe. The phrase is usually oddly specific, while the author pretends to convey a general idea or talks about something entirely unrelated.

hn_throwaway_99• 7 years ago

Would actually be great if the Calling Bullshit class used this exact article as an example of some techniques to spot.

gambler2• 7 years ago

I think the class is more about analyzing data:

https://callingbull.org/

leftyted• 7 years ago

I think you're wrong.

That quote assumes that when people think about "calling bullshit" in relation to the news that they would immediately think of Fox News or The National Enquirer. Is that wrong? Won't most Guardian readers immediately think of Fox News when they read this headline?

When I clicked on this article, I started from a perspective of "Oh look, it's The Guardian, a lefty publication, talking about how Fox News is bad. How shocking". I was wrong.

So yeah, I don't think the bit you quoted is an attempt to manipulate readers. By referencing Fox News, it's just trying to account for what it assumes its readers already think. And I think it's basically correct in those assumptions.

Bartweiss2• 7 years ago

To the article's credit, that section makes a real effort to differentiate "bullshit" from "fake news" and "fallacious".

I know an awful lot of people who are too educated and internet-savvy to accept most nakedly-false claims, but happily bite on stats that lack per-capita corrections, or compare rates like change and accuracy without accounting for base values, or even make subtle but concrete errors like confusing 'ppm' with 'ppb'. They may not accept anything farcically false, but "less wrong" is not always "more right", and it's still easy to end up believe an entire-untrue claim off respectable looking sources. I think the focus on Snopes-style truth ratings has sometimes hindered our ability to literally call 'bullshit', asserting that a piece undermines knowledge regardless of its technical correctness.

I'm not sure if this article succeeds at that - I think conflating Fox with The National Enquirer and other sources that regularly invent things outright is a mistake that obscures the discussion. (Fox has run content sourced from RealTrueNews, but the distinction still matters; fake news sites and the media titans legitimizing their stories are different parts of the ecosystem.) But it's a worthwhile attempt regardless.

Bartweiss2• 7 years ago

I think the rhetorical term is apophasis. It's the same sort of deniable invocation as declaring "I won't stoop to talking about my opponent's sordid affair". A rhetoric teacher might say that it's just another way to persuasively make a point, but it seems hard to deny some manipulation or dishonesty when the "I won't say" element is intentionally false.

You make an interesting point about the recent/online deployment of it. Most examples of apophasis are about bringing up familiar topics without owning that action, as with invoking rumors or ad hominems in a debate. But I increasingly see the version you're describe, where it's used as a way to present a very specific statement without needing to defend it. A lot of old uses of the technique only work as a full sentence, specifically to avoid being quoted as saying the inappropriate thing directly. But the new ones do the opposite, very specifically accommodating misleading pull quotes. "As a recent Guardian article about critical thinking courses said, 'Fox News promotes "fake news"...'" The phrase comes into existence, soundbite ready, without anyone needing to actually defend it.

Perhaps this isn't the most extreme example, since the author might readily defend the "fake news" claim, but it still serves to associate the college course with rejecting Fox when that's expressly not the point.

drinane• 7 years ago

For me it was English Comp freshman year from this wild man: https://www.winona.edu/english/brault.asp

monksy2• 7 years ago

So, in other words, a class in critical thinking and media literacy.

random_upvoter• 7 years ago

Speaking of bullshit, have the Guardian retracted their story about Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange in London?

bogle• 7 years ago

Why, has Manafort denied it? Oh, wait, that Paul Manafort. Man of his word, he is.

starik36• 7 years ago

That's exactly right. And even if they do, it'll be some small article on page 20 equivalent of the web.

For Guardian (or others) to really regain the trust, they should have a WE WERE WRONG article on their front page for as long as their fake story was there. And it should outline where they went wrong and what steps will be taken to make sure it doesn't happen again.

growlist• 7 years ago

Should be especially useful when reading the Grauniad then!

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

Their example about the algorithm that predicts if you’re a criminal by looking at your face seems... poorly thought out. Note, it’s not facial recognition. It’s prediction. They make the claim that it’s all about jury perception. Maybe it is, but far more important is that it’s likely just using an estimate of race and wealth. I’m annoyed that they didn’t talk about the bigger red flag: “90% accuracy”.

Maybe they should just teach stats...

Edit: pre-empting a nitpick: when I say “wealth” I mean largely as proxied by hairstyle

joombaga• 7 years ago

Don't facial recognition systems generally use predictive models?

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

As the article was worded, it was not a system to predict whose face it was, but rather to predict, baseline, if a person were a criminal (as a descriptor, not a specific one)

miesman• 7 years ago

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo

degenerate• 7 years ago

Haha, not much has changed, except now instead of emails/letters they show tweets. Cable news is a waste of time.

seppin2• 7 years ago

"I'm just some fucking guy"

lsniddy2• 7 years ago

Here's the easiest way to understand how inaccurate most reporting is:

Read any mainstream coverage over a topic you are deeply knowledgeable in.

Balgair• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

lsniddy2• 7 years ago

Hah great, it appears theres a second step that needs to be explicit:

Apply to all topics

'Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news

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