#callingbullshit

J'étais pas prêt pour la fiche de poste de DAS astro au #CNRS au format corporate middle management linkedin On est grangrénés jusqu'au trognon. #CallingBullshit

Spotted this excellent book on my travels, translated into Chinese, in a Ningbo (Zhejiang province) bookstore.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom and @jevinwest

Publisher: CITIC Press (state-owned)
ISBN: 978-7-5217-3879-7
List price: 79 RMB ($10.77)

#CallingBullshit

@futurebird Has @ct_bergstrom been heard from on this? Stats IS more relevant to #CallingBullshit, which is a badly needed life skill, if not a math capstone.

@lauren
I prefer calling ChatGPT inaccuracies bullshitting, following the lead of
@ct_bergstrom
Coauthor of #CallingBullshit

HT @ct_bergstrom & Jevin D West for introducing #HarryFrankfurt to by reading they #CallingBullshit book:

» Frankfurt ...described #bullshit as what people create when they try to impress or persuade you, without any concern for whether what they are saying is true or false, correct or incorrect

...

Frankfurt's distinction ..lies are designed to lead away from the truth; bullshit is produced with a gross indifference to the truth «

#RIP
Harry G. Frankfurt
1929 - 2023

#OnBullshit

We all probably think we're pretty good at spotting #bullshit when someone tries to feed it to us.

Honestly, we are probably all less-good at it than we think.

#CallingBullshit is an actual University course, taught by actual University Data Scientist Professor persons.

The entire course is available online, for free. No bullshit. Educate yourself.

https://callingbullshit.org

I’m pleased to report that #CallingBullshit got better as I read it. Chapter 6 was pretty good, and mostly dealt with being a human who experiences something that’s counterintuitive statistically, like class sizes in school.

I keep thinking of #LarryGonick’s #CartoonGuideToStatistics while reading. I think this book may have benefited from a similar graphic treatment. There’s detail in footnotes that might be better in sidebars.

I’m growing more and more disappointed in #CallingBullshit. Chapter 2 would have benefited from consultations with some other academics who have knowledge in the topic of social media, like #AmyBruckman, folks in the #skeptic #sceptic movement, like #StevenNovella, and research on the history and use of the #FairnessDoctine as an ineffective tool of moderation but effective tool of of suppression.

As it reads now, it’s very thin on facts and long on opinions.

I was kinda into #CallingBullshit until the authors fundamentally misunderstood why people post their lunches on social media and started blathering nonsense about the Fairness Doctrine. I hope it gets better than this cloud yelling

@lauren
Oddly, the people who use Mastodon like Mastodon, as @lauren says

In #CallingBullshit there is a chapter "Selection Bias", which explains this concept, book by
@ct_bergstrom and @jevinwest

Oooh!

--

Calling Bullshit by Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West: 9780525509202 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Bullshit isn’t what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.   “A...

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/563882/calling-bullshit-by-carl-t-bergstrom-and-jevin-d-west/

#callingBullshit #misinformation #disinformation #skepticism #bookRecommendation

In addition to my book recommendation yesterday (https://qoto.org/@bloc/109377741972697407), I'd like to share this gem, even if the original article is in German:

https://www.handelszeitung.ch/politik/klima-auto-schlagt-velo-und-ov-545475

This one is a textbook example of bullshit, although a pretty obvious one. For those not capable of the German language:

A professor of financial and economics tries to work out the numbers showing why bicycle and public transport are worse options going by car in terms of climate effects.
For public transport, he argues that even why those may be powered by green, locally generated electricity, this electricity could otherwise be provided to the power grid, therefore public transport was the reason CO2-intensive power plants could not be taken of the grid.
For bike, he compares the CO2 footprint of a 5 Liter per 100 km (app. 47 mpg) car with 4 passengers (no, this is certainly not the standard here) to the additional food intake a biker would need to handle longer travels (seriously!), which, for the calculation to carry home the point, is assumed to be almost pure beef.

#callingbullshit @ct_bergstrom #climatechange

Highly educational explanation of "right censorship" leading to hard-to-detect logical fallacies: https://youtu.be/ITWQ5psx9Sw #CallingBullshit

Related: #DataScience has "almost never any easy conclusions, just hard ones, and th[ose] are error prone. What analysts don't talk about is how many incorrect charts…get made on the way to making correct ones. Or ones we think are correct. A good #DataViz is so incredibly persuasive that it almost doesn't even matter if it's right…" https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201