In today’s Seattle Times there is an editorial about fake news and an opinion piece, How to fine-tune your BS meter, by Jevin West.
At the University of Washington, West and Carl Bergstrom, have started a course entitled, Calling BS: Data reasoning for the digital age.
West states:
Our philosophy is that you don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics or computer science to call BS on the vast majority of data bullshit. If you think clearly about what might be wrong with the data someone is using and what might be wrong about the interpretation of their results, you’ll catch a huge fraction of the bullshit without ever going into the mathematical details.
Unfortunately, this applies to science as much as to Fake News. On his blog, Peter Woit discusses the rise of Fake Physics.Science is in trouble when the word I most often hear associated with the name of a particular Ivy League science Professor is BS. Furthermore, in many contexts, I hear people dismiss specific papers,
particularly that appear in luxury journals, as “just BS”.
A good question is what criteria should we use to distinguish between uncritical enthusiasm, marketing, hype, and BS?
I first thought of writing a post on this subject when I encountered this video clip from CNN.
I thought, “Wow! Who is this commentator?” Maybe I should have known, but I learned that Fareek Zakaria has quite a following, a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard, and is rightly viewed as a serious commentator, regardless of whether you agree with his political leanings.
The commentary is based on a number one New York Times bestseller, On BS by Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished Princeton philosopher.
This article came in times education supplement
ReplyDeletehttps://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/10/study-finds-researchers-britain-and-australia-skip-truth-get-research-grants
from the above article.
“If you can find me a single academic who hasn’t had to bullshit or bluff or lie or embellish in order to get grants, then I will find you an academic who is in trouble with [their] head of department,” said one professor in ...........
Stanford Uni has a senior scientist to handle ethics, bs etc. This is a good sign. Here is his web site.
http://danielefanelli.com/aboutMe.html#interests
His publications
http://danielefanelli.com/publications.html
DF mentioned above is from this dept set up at Stanford. Will they be able to tackle Global BS?
ReplyDeletehttps://metrics.stanford.edu/