Are you frustrated with the volume of unreliable information on the internet?
Watch this university lecture on calling bullshit
You don’t have to be enrolled to tune into lectures on spotting bad information such as fake news and shoddy analysis of big data.
You’re in luck. You can now watch two University of Washington professors complain about bullshit and teach students how to identify it.
Lectures from a course called “Calling Bullshit” are being uploaded to the internet and the first class session is already available on YouTube. The lecture is broken into five separate segments, each between about three and 10 minutes long.
“There is so much bullshit, so much bullshit, everywhere — we’re drowning in it,” opens biology professor Carl Bergstrom.
The course addresses issues like misapplying statistics methods to big data, poor and misleading application of machine learning algorithms, and fake news. The syllabus went viral when it posted.
You can continue to follow along with lectures and other materials at the course website. Here’s the first segment of the first lesson.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
