politicians are unconstrained by fact
disinformation has reached epidemic
levels even my field in science has been
tarnished by predatory journals and the
press release and yes even Ted has been
known to create a platform for a little
bit of stylistic BS now there’s been a
lot of talk over the last year about
fake news and the consequences really
should not be ignored but I have to
admit some of it’s actually kind of good
and pleasantly entertaining earlier this
year I learned the Taylor Swift is
dating Senator McCarthy now there are a
lot of fans that have been disappointed
with this they’ve been disappointed
because it was the fourth guy in six
months fortunately we do have we do have
fact checkers on the web and someone
noted that Senator Joseph McCarthy died
50 years ago so we’re good there now
this kind of fake news is a needed
reprieve from our intense politically
charged news cycle that we see every day
but what happens when news like this
starts moving around the internet
according to a wd news Israel was
threatening Pakistan with nuclear
weapons if they send troops into Syria
now this sort of thing you know we look
at this and we say well there’s
grammatical errors in the headline if
you look closely they were talking about
the wrong Defense Minister in Israel it
was irrefutably fake news it was taken
down there was no debate whether this
was real but it wasn’t taken down
soon enough in response to this fake
news item the Defense Minister of
Pakistan tweeted back with a sword
rattling tweet Israel forgets that
Pakistan is a nuclear state as well now
most of the fake news out there on the
web is a minor annoyance and as I
mentioned sometimes entertaining but the
kind of fake news we’re seeing now world
preservation is at stake now one of the
things that we’ve tried to do my
colleague and I is figure out how we can
bring our skills from what we do in
science in refutation and teach a class
on spotting and refuting BS we want to
teach students how to address these
kinds of things they’re seeing in the
news address them in dinner
conversations but we have a particular
emphasis on a new school kind of BS this
is BS that’s wrapped in data graphics
statistics it can carry this veneer of
authority that really is undeserving
earlier in January of this year on
January 11th we released the course we
woke up the next morning and there were
tens of thousands of people from all
over the world in one night it really
seemed to have struck a chord when we
officially made it a registered course
at the University it filled within less
than a minute 160 seats filled within
less than a minute from 40 different
majors across campus that’s what I’m
most proud of is that everyone is
recognizing this sort of thing but if
all the things that have made us get
most excited about it is that 60
universities have now contact us to
teach this kind of material now we have
a version that doesn’t have swear words
in it too so that’s good we have calling
ball org but it really does seem to a
struck a chord now we have 40 hours of
lecture we continue to make this content
available but one of
most important principles that we want
to teach to students and the general
public it’s something that comes from
Brandolini x’ BS asymmetry principle
it’s it’s a great principle if you study
studies and that is that it’s
an order of magnitude it takes an order
of magnitude more energy to refute BS
than it does to create it in other words
yes is easy to create there’s incentives
to do this it doesn’t cost that much
money there’s not really legal
ramifications for it but once it gets
out there even after refutation it’s
hard to clean up now the recent pizza
gate scandal is really a perfect example
of this according to the conspiracy
Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile
ring in the pizzeria of Comet a comet
ping pong it’s a restaurant in DC Edgar
Welch a citizen of Salisbury North
Carolina wanted to do something about it
he’d been reading it on the Internet he
decided to pick up his gun get in his
truck and drive to this pizzeria luckily
no one was hurt but even after he found
out that it was fake
even after Alex Jones who was one of the
primary promulgator ‘s of this
particular news after he apologized and
admitted that it was not true earlier
this year after all of that families
felt so strongly that this was a
cover-up that the conspiracy was alive
that they went to the White House lawn
and protested so Brandolini say symmetry
principle we see it all the time even
after you clean up now the creators of
this fake news and the propagators are
certainly to blame they share most of
the blame but we the readers are to
blame as well earlier this year science
Post published a story saying that 70%
of Facebook users only read the headline
I hear some laughters in there so I
think I know what’s coming at the time
of this screen capture by the way
this was a real headline there were tens
of thousands of people that had shared
this but if you were one of those rare
readers of stories one of those rare
readers you would have found lorem ipsum
random text this was not a real story it
was a joke on readers who only read
headlines about a story that only read
so that’s lesson number one let’s read
beyond the headlines it takes a lot of
effort and we are inundated with
information we can’t read everything so
people have said give me one slide that
you want to give to the class if that’s
all you could give it’s four words it’s
an addendum to this first lesson and
that is think more shared less instead
of share more but I will say that it’s
not the headline spread spreading that
concerns me the most it’s the imagery
spreading it’s those deep emotion of
voguing memes that pass around the
internet that drive wedges between us in
January of last year Seattle Seahawks
thumped the Arizona Cardinals yeah and
they were celebrating in the locker room
but they weren’t celebrating over the
victory they were celebrating over
Michael Bennett burning the American
now of course this was photoshopped and
the Facebook page that put it up
originally did take it down they even
admitted that it was fake but not soon
enough it’s these kind of images that
are driving wedges between us that are
so watch out for those emotional hooks
get in our way of being able to truly be
s detect they get to the deep centers of
our brain and it’s hard to think
logically now I will say that students
are good at finding these things we’ve
done lots of little tests back and forth
we do quizzes fun quizzes in class where
we have them sort of differentiate
between the real and not real they can
identify those memes and those headlines
and they’d even create good habits of
mind by reading headlines but the thing
that we’re finding most people are
struggling with the most is this BS
wrapped in charts they’re everywhere now
in this world of big data now there’s
been a lot of discussion around the gun
laws one of the controversial laws that
was enacted in 2005 in Florida was a law
the stand-your-ground law the idea was
that if you feel threatened in your home
or in your place where you deserve you
can respond with lethal force now
there’s there’s been lots of debates
backwards and forwards on whether this
would create decrease or increase crime
decrease or increase gun deaths but if
you look at this chart the gun law was
enacted in 2005 and you see that the
black line goes down but something
highly unconventional is going on with
this graph most of you have noticed it
the 0 was put at the top now that tells
a much different story but I’m starting
easy for you there are many more subtle
ways to manipulate data arguments
because that’s where they’re coming now
if I was if I wanted to write a story
about the industriousness of German
Workers compared to those lazy French I
could make a chart like this you know in
this chart the line itself is more than
three times bigger than the other line
but you can clearly see that 40 and 37
are not that different so what am I
doing here
I’m simply zooming in and I can zoom in
enough to exacerbate those differences
so much I can make any argument I want
with a chart there’s many easy ways to
manipulate with axes
and this is where we all can can become
good BS detectors because it’s easy to
manipulate but really easy to call BS on
a more honest way of reporting this is
to include the zero simple but you’ll
see this all the time I see it every day
literally every day now there’s also
been a lot of discussion about climate
change and the raising temperature NASA
makes these data available so anyone can
plot them they typically look like this
over the last hundred years from the
1950s we see a general two degree
increase now we can debate whether
that’s significant or not but this is
the data now I can do something magical
by just zooming out far enough I can
create a graph like the National Review
claimed was the only graph you needed to
see on climate change
zoom far enough out and you can even
take a diagonal and make it look flat so
that’s the lesson here it sounds a
little more technical but everyone in
this room can start sounding smart in
the board meeting or anytime they read
their newspapers look out for axis
manipulation both zooming in and zooming
out you can create different arguments
all the time but people ask me aren’t
these honest mistakes and actually yes
I truly am an optimist on of people and
I think most of the time they’re honest
mistakes but how can you tell honest
mistakes from shenanigans
ask three questions they’re really
useful ask who is telling me this how do
they know it and what do they have to
gain from it imagine that I am telling
you right now I’ve got a new vitamin
it’s gonna make you 24% smarter just
meet me after my talk I’ll give you a
great deal
now you will call BS on that that’s easy
but we want to do that in all
circumstances in graphs as well but what
we’re seeing in our media every day is
the selling of narratives from our left
media and our right media we need to be
aware of this earlier this year MSNBC
tweeted the following during the debate
on the immigration policy whether you
agree with it or not this
was tweeted it said that international
applications at American schools were
down 40% now something I tell my
students all the time
dig to the source students have been
hearing this since the early days of
librarian exposure as elementary kids
but do this so thank you librarians good
job but here’s the actual report if you
dig to the report by the American
Association of college registrar’s here
is the main finding the finding was not
that the applications were down 40% they
were down at 40% of the schools which is
a much different story
1% 2% in these 40 percent of the schools
but here’s on top of that you find that
it was up at 35 percent of the schools
so much different stories now you know
if it sounds too good to be true
or too bad in this case it probably is
this is a favorite among the students I
have this almost every day in class
they’ll come running up to me in class
and they’ll say I found something that
sounded too good to be true and they’re
just so excited they’re pulling up their
computer we look at it and they
generally a’right use this one this
one’s a lot of fun I use this one every
day as well now this narrative selling
is not just a left media problem the
right media has been known to share a
few narratives of their own the food
stamp discussion has certainly been won
last year they reported that 70 million
dollars had been lost to fraud
sounds like a big number should we even
keep the program around that’s a lot of
wasted money but one thing I tell my
students is that you need to put those
numbers in context 70 million dollars
means nothing unless you know what it is
in the full budget in this case or the
context for which that number came now
we teach students how to do Fermi
estimations and ways of testing the
plausibility of an argument I won’t go
through that but I will show you that if
you do that quickly the actual budget is
about 30 billion it’s actually high
but through this estimation through the
behind the napkin kind of calculation
you find that it’s an incredibly small
loss rate most of retail and Nordstrom
here in Seattle and and Starbucks they
would love the kind of loss rate that’s
been shown here but that’s not the best
part of this story the best part of this
story was that the Agriculture
Department was a little bit irritated
and they demanded a retraction Fox News
did acquiesce and admitted that the
number was not real but here’s the best
part it was actually much higher the
fraud way was actually about 10 times
greater than that they were fine saying
that because the conclusions held the
fraud rate is actually quite small
should we cancel a program were 499
people out of 500 are properly using the
program I don’t think so
so you know in in Seattle we are proud
of our environmental conscience but
instead of just being carbon neutral I
encourage us all to be neutral
we’re humans we make mistakes we create
and we promulgate when we don’t
even know it but we need to start
cleaning up this mess I have found in
teaching this class that students love
to call BS but they generally like
calling BS on the other team the left
team the right team the red the blue but
to be sophisticated detectors
we need to be able to call BS on our own
team and then clean up our own yard
first as Neil postman said so eloquently
more than 50 years ago exactly 50 years
ago at any given time the chief source
of that we must contend is
ourself if we want to maintain
a strong democracy and we want to
strengthen collective decision-making we
need to be able to look at our own
communities call BS on ourselves and
we’ll be better off thank you
you [Applause]