A Class on Fighting Bullshit
Here’s what I think education — at all levels — is missing:
Let’s call it BFT 101: Bullshit Fighting.
I’ve outlined a undergraduate-level course, but this should trickle down to high schoolers and elementary schoolers and trickle up to law school students and adults in rural Alabama. If the title offends you, you can rename this curriculum “Media Literacy.” Or “How Not To Be Brainwashed.”
But the basic idea would be, to paraphrase Jon Stewart:
Bullshit is everywhere. And the best defense against bullshit is vigilance.
And indeed, bullshit is everywhere. There’s science bullshit, like creationism, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO activism, Dr. Oz, and climate change denial. There’s legal bullshit, for which Jon Stewart mentions the Patriot Act and Dodd-Frank. There’s also political bullshit, best seen in phrases like “post-racial society,” “death panels,” “religious freedom,” “national security,” and “ethics in video game journalism.”
In the age of Internet commentary and radicalized dark-money politicians, bullshit is easier than ever to create and spread. And most of us aren’t prepared to counter it.
What is bullshit?
I’ll go by Harry Frankfurt’s view, as written in “On Bullshit:”
“[The bullshitter] is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose” (17).
Honest people tell the truth. Liars tell something they know isn’t true. Bullshitters don’t care what is true.
Take Gamergate. Who cares whether “ethics in game journalism” is really a problem? It just makes for a better tagline than “I hate Anita Sarkeesian.”
And often that bullshit comes served on a plate of incomprehensible writing. I’ll let George Orwell explain in “Politics and the English Language”:
In our time, political speech and writing [Translation: bullshit] are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
That euphemism and vagueness come from tactics like clichés (“melting pot” “land of opportunity”), meaningless words (“hope” “freedom” “terrorism”), and just sticking together words and words and words until they bleed together before your eyes (terms and conditions statements). If you do it right, you can sound smart and without being smart — or even correct. And even if you do it wrong, no one will know what you were hiding anyway.
Interesting side note, this style of writing is encouraged in K-12 English classes. It has to be, considering how many of my peers — even A-students — write this way.
We are not prepared.
Our education is based on facts and vocational skills. The latter piece is for good reason — jobs need education, education is expensive now, jobs help pay for education, so why the hell do I need to study history for medical school? The former piece had a good reason, back when looking things up was hard. If searching through tables required spending six hours in a library, you might as well memorize at least part of what you needed to do.
But that’s changed. Now, I can Google the atomic radius of silicon (117.6 picometers) or look up the median household income of Newton, Massachusetts (about $113K in 2012) on Wolfram Alpha. Information is cheap. All you need to do is look for it, find the signal in the noise, and make sense of what you just found.
But I have never taken a class on rhetoric. Or philosophy. Or general scientific/technological literacy. For example, no one really taught me how the Internet works, even though it’s a critical part of my life — and a current battleground for civil liberties like privacy, freedom of information, and the ability to create things.
In fact, the most insightful-for-bullshit-fighting class I took was AP Bio. Yes, it’s one of the most facts-y classes possible, but it was also just a broad introduction to biology — wide enough that it covers everything, deep enough that I can pull out a bio-sounding phrase (plasmosis), Google it, and realize that it’s not a real word and that the real word was probably plasmolysis. (When cells shrivel up because they don’t have enough water. It’s why salt water is not drinkable.)
I forgot a lot of the little details, sure, but because I know the basics of biology, scientific research, and asking smart questions, I’m clever enough to figure out that Dr. Oz’s claim that green coffee extract reduces weight is full of shit. Don’t ask me, ask this meta-analysis of randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trials that I found online in five minutes!
The Syllabus:
This class would teach the fundamentals. You wouldn’t learn about anything, per se. Instead, you’ll learn the language and the thought process. You’ll learn research, logic, and written and spoken rhetoric. You’ll learn how to parse legalese, break down the speeches of disingenuous politicians, and call out rhetorical fallacies. You’ll learn how to look for proof, learn about large topics in a short amount of time, and ask the kinds of questions that end people.
You would read strong writing and weak writing. You would see effective arguments, shaky arguments, and arguments so full of themselves that they feel true even when they aren’t.
You would learn how to question.
You would learn how to communicate.
You would learn how to learn.
Yes, this would be your intro writing course. Research, analyze, compile, argue. But this would also be your intro philosophy course. Question, test, conclude, repeat. Because writing is thinking. You can’t be good at one without being good at the other.
The goal? See any argument, learn the facts behind it, decide whether it’s a ruse, and if it is, act quickly and powerfully enough to prevent major damage to society.
Your final exam: You get the Internet, five arguments with topics from stem cells to Rembrandt, and fifty minutes. You are told two of the arguments are lies. You have to find out which three arguments are broken.
Why?
This class should make people dangerous. Dangerous to those in power, dangerous to firebrands living off fear and book sales, dangerous to the status quo. If Socrates really “corrupted the youth,” this class would disrupt youth corruption, reformat it in a scalable architecture, and become the new juggernaut in the industry.
Why? Because an educated population breaks power. An educated population can’t be lied to. An educated population won’t stand for meaningless wars, illusions of action, or infringements upon their rights. This is why the liberal arts are so important. They foster a broad understanding of the world that makes lying to people more difficult.
Unfortunately, the liberal arts doesn’t get you a job, so instead I get four-plus engineering classes every semester. BFT 101 is an compromise between the goal of liberal arts and the reality of technical education. Even if you can’t turn everyone in the class into a professional skeptic in fourteen weeks, you can at least get enough students curious, clever, and angry enough to someday become the next megaphone atop a police car, or the next obstruction to a tank’s path.
We humans need dangerous people to fight bullshit — they’re our only real defense from oppression.
Teaching this class would be a start.
