We’re drowning in BS, but you can learn how to fight back

Jevin West is not afraid to call out bullshit for what it is and wants to teach us how to do the same.

West is an assistant professor and co-creator of a new course, “Calling BS: data reasoning in a digital world” at the University of Washington. In this engaging talk, West shows how dangerous and misleading some news stories can be and warns that while BS is fairly easy to create, it’s harder to clean up, especially when shared relentlessly on social media. Jevin D. West is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He co-founded the DataLab, a collection of faculty and graduate students focused on research in Data Curation, Computational Social Science, Data for Social Good, Information Visualization and the Science of Science. He is one of the chief architects of the new Data Science curricula for undergraduate and graduate programs at UW. Together with Carl Bergstrom, he developed the Calling Bullshit course to help the public refute the onslaught of misinformation in today’s digital and data-driven environments. The course is being adopted at universities and high schools around the world. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.