
Calling Bullshit – Syllabus - phr4ts
http://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html
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orionblastar
Good course. I took a class like it called Critical Thinking.

Fake news has been around a long time, before the Internet as well. I worked
in a college computer lab and their IBM PC based BBS. SYSOP of the BBS is a
friend of mine, he gave an interview on BBSing. He said, "The professors
sometimes write text files for their students to download and read for class,
in that instance going to the library is not required." The college newspaper
cut his words and took them out of context and wrote: "The BBS makes books
obsolete, going to the library is not necessary." It got the Liberal angry at
us and this was 1987.

In the 1970s, our neighborhood had a rat problem, everyone on the street had
rats come out of the sewers and climb our fences and get into our houses. We
had complained to city hall about it because they did something wrong with the
sewers. Instead, our house and family got blamed for it in the city newspaper.
They even got the pest control name wrong for a quote.

But yeah a lot of stuff you can see as BS as it does not follow any sort of
logic, it does not obey the law of physics or thermodynamics, it does not obey
federal law or the US constitution, and with statistics it does not calculate
the margin of error and when you load the numbers into Excel and calculate it
there it is huge.

