3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Scientific, statistical and logical literacy is a necessary skill for evaluating policy proposals, reading news articles with an appropriately critical eye, and making informed choices as consumers and voters. Misunderstanding of claims made in scientific publications, online publishing platforms, and mass media drives, in part, the spread of malicious misinformation and propaganda online. Further, many actors have the means, the motive and the opportunity to mislead the public in a variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. This class will give you tools to discern valid and invalid forms of inference and discourse, and give you tools to communicate precisely, argue appropriately, and stay on top of research and news with an appropriately skeptical attitude. A use case used throughout the class will be online disinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The class will draw on historical and modern literature on linguistic, logical, and probabilistic fallacies, statistical and logical inference, data visualization, cognitive biases, and the scientific method.