Daniel L. Hartl (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (FAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
First-Year Seminar 52N (Spring Term) Enrollment: Limited to 15
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45 AM CANVAS SITE
The world these days is awash in hustlers, frauds, scammers, grifters, and thieves. To which there’s no shortage of easy marks, suckers, dupes, and fools. Old-fashioned cons like three-card monte are history. Nowadays the internet has changed the game. The idea now is to suck you into clickbait. You’re a sucker, so are your friends, so am I, so is everybody. We don’t notice we’re being scammed because what is being stolen is not our money but our attention and our time. Beyond time wasted on websites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, we are easily sucked into clickbait sites like Listicles, Buzzfeed, TMZ, Huzlers, Alltop, Trivianerd, Quizly, and Zimbio. What’s wrong with clickbait is that it leads us down a rabbit hole of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that lead to skepticism and mistrust of science and scientists. Even the most educated and savvy consumer of information is easily misled in today’s complex information ecosystem. As the old adage says about poker, “If you can’t identify the sucker at the table, it’s you.” This seminar aims to boost your critical thinking. It is designed to help you identify and refute misinformation, disinformation, and BS rampant on the internet. It will help you recognize sensationalism when science is communicated in the press. It will familiarize you with the main logical fallacies that all of us are sometimes prone to. As a framework for discussion, we use videos from Bergstrom and West’s book “Calling Bullshit” along with supplemental readings.