Calling Bullshit 2.5: Unfair Comparisons

In this segment on unfair comparisons, Carl explains why St. Louis and Detroit are not quite as bad as clickbait "most dangerous cities" lists portray them to be, and looks at the silly arguments over attendance at Trump's inauguration. Also: how to call bullshit on algorithms and statistics without a PhD in machine learning or statistics.

Course: INFO 198 / BIOL 106B. University of Washington
Instructors: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West
Synopsis: Our world is saturated with bullshit. Learn to detect and defuse it.

The course will be offered as a 1-credit seminar this spring through the Information School at the University of Washington. We aim to expand it to a 3 or 4 credit course for 2017-2018. For those who cannot attend in person, we aim to videotape the lectures this spring and make video clips freely available on the web.

Video edited by Bum Mook Oh
Music by Chris Zabriskie: Prelude No.7

[TheGsGClan]

The Piano starts to get annoying if you are bingewatch all of these

[janbolmer]

Thanks for uploading - very interesting!

[robertzverina]

Thanks for the useful lectures but I hope this isn't produced by UW film program. It would be helpful to equalize the audio so it doesn't keep going in and out as lecturer turns their head. Of course, actually speaking into the mic would solve it, too...

[doublej]

Is comparing food stamp fraud to retail fraud an apples to apples comparison?

[ACitizenOfOurWorld]

The appropriate response from Trump's team would have been to point out that this was an unfair comparison between the attendance at the inauguration of the first black president (a very significant event in American history) and the attendance at just another old white man's inauguration. The fair comparison would have been to show GW Bush's (R), Bill Clinton's(D) and Jimmy Carter's(D) first inauguration crowd's vs Trump's.
This lecture correctly pointed out the apples to oranges comparison error of Trump's supporters regarding the streaming video audience. It left out the bias revealed by the left leaning sources who started the unfair photo comparison between a highly historical event and one that has been regularly occurring over the past 200 years. I'm pretty sure there will be a packed crowd when the first women is sworn in as well, whether she's a Republican or Democrat.

[yesmsg]

Question: Wasn't the Conservative Media claim less that more people watched streaming video, and more the hypothesis that because they were watching streaming media, they did not attend? That was not proven, but was how I read their statement.

[NonyaDamnbusiness]

It clearly says "city" and not "metro" and yet you bring in the entire metro area to try to make the numbers look not bad at all. I call bullshit on your bullshit.
If they wanted to include the metro then they would clearly state "metro". But they didn't. You're literally comparing apples (City of St. Louis) to oranges (St. Louis Metro).
What I find even more strange is that you're leaving out Chicago. Listen online to the police scanner for Chicago and you'll quickly see that the south side turns into a shooting gallery after dark, and a robbery and car-jacking hotspot during the day.
You're own childhood memories of St. Louis have obviously given you a confirmation bias and thus "bullshit".
Also, you looked only at the 2009 inauguration and not the 2012 one, i.e. Obama's second one? Yeah, I call bullshit on that one as well. More confirmation bias.