JEVIN WEST: Perfectly honest,
when we released the site
on January 11th, we thought
maybe a couple of our friends
would think it was kind of cool.
We would have never
thought, after we woke up
the next morning with
tens of thousands of hits
from all over the world,
just in that first day--
and since then, we've had
massive, explosive growth
in our users.
You can see this
just in tracking
over the last few days.
We've been getting hits
from all over the world.
You can see this was just
in the first week or so.
We had visitors from
all over the world.
The only places that we haven't
got-- if anyone knows anyone
in Uzbekistan, or
maybe North Korea,
we haven't gotten anything
from North Korea yet.
But the one that Carl
and I really, really want
is Greenland.
So we'll be willing to give
extra credit for anyone
to fly to Greenland or
set up a proxy somehow.
That would be great.
So yes, yes, the
elephant's in the room.
We're going to brag
a little bit here.
It has been in the news.
And really, what this says
is that it is resonating
with people, I think.
We're not the only ones
that see that there needs
to be some calling of bullshit.
You guys see that.
It's why you signed up.
We depend on you.
You're the generation that's
going to take care of me
when I get older.
So please, I want you
to get good at this.
And this is the news.
We've been on news.
Carl and I have never
really had this,
so this is a sort of star
struck kind of effect.
But also, I just want to
mention that K5, KING 5,
will be here next
week in this class.
So if you don't want to be
on camera, sit in the back.
And Fox News will be here, and
you may get asked to interview.
You don't have to interview.
No, your grade won't be affected
if you call bullshit on us
and say, that was the
stupidest class I ever took.
Don't worry, just know that
there will be media here.
We've been meeting
with The Chronicle--
CARL T. BERGSTROM: You
know, hang on, Jevin.
Hang on a second.
Give me the mic.
Give me the mic.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I am a little bit suspicious
about what we just saw.
Let me get this mic up
so people can hear me.
I'm a little bit suspicious
about what we just saw.
Look what Jevin just
showed you guys.
Anyone see anything
wrong with that?
Yeah?
STUDENT: It started at 100,000.
CARL T. BERGSTROM: Yeah, right.
Look at that.
It's starting at 100,000.
That's a little bit fishy.
It makes you wonder, well,
what's going on here?
Right?
And I think that's kind of
the least of the problems.
Look how he's titling this.
He says this is explosive
growth at callingbullshit.org.
Now, what is this showing?
It's showing it's
going up, right?
But explosive growth?
Well, I don't know.
So what are we measuring here?
This is totally unique visitors.
What do we expect to happen
to totally unique visitors?
It's not going to go down.
There's no way
for it to go down.
So of course, it's going up.
Is this explosive growth?
Right?
So I don't know.
And besides, this is a famous
form of graphical bullshit.
This one was graphical
bullshit that Tim Cook
tried to pull when he
tried to fill Steve Jobs'
far too large shoes.
He steps in as the CEO of
Apple, and iPhone sales
flatten, and then
actually start to decline.
And he steps up in 2014 in
front of his shareholders,
and he says, look, cumulative
iPhone sales are exploding.
Right?
Well, what are cumulative
iPhone sales actually doing?
Well, they're going up.
They don't go down.
That's true of many
cumulative things.
But look at this graph.
Here's another way to
visualize the same data.
Here's total sales.
That's what he showed.
Here's quarterly sales.
Apple's in a slide
after he took over.
He's tried to hide it by
graphing it like that.
So look familiar?
[LAUGHTER]
So, a couple of
things going on here.
I mean, first of
all, Jevin didn't
want you to see that our
biggest growth was at the start,
and we've been just moving
along OK since then.
But we went viral at the start.
That's what the internet
does to you occasionally,
and so that's what happened.
But if we look at
our daily users,
daily number of users, here
is what we see over time.
We're kind of blowing that up so
you can see it a little better.
Here's a picture of what's
going on for our daily users.
Now, would you call
that explosive growth
if I showed you that?
I would call that
a lot of people
cared, and then they didn't,
and then just when it seemed
like they didn't,
they did a bit,
and then they didn't,
and then they did a bit,
and then they didn't,
and then maybe a bit.
And we seem to be
having a good run here.
And each of these, of course,
correspond to news stories
and so forth that
have been published.
So what Jevin just
gave you there
was really a piece of what
I'd call new-school bullshit.
He's trying to pull something
over on you using fancy graphs.
Everyone knows graphs have
hard numbers behind them,
so we should
believe them, right?
No.
So to kind of bring
this out, I want
to just highlight the difference
between old-school bullshit
and new-school bullshit.
So old-school bullshit.
This is not what
the course is about,
but we're all used to this.
People try to use
fancy words in order
to impress you, or
make you believe them,
or at least make you
think that they must
be doing something impressive.
So our collective mission
is to functionalize
customer-driven
enterprise solutions
for leveraging underutilized
portfolio transparencies.
Anyone have any idea
what that means?
No idea what that means.
That's old school bullshit.
We exist as transmissions.
To embark on the myth is
to become one with it.
That's old-school
new age bullshit.
[LAUGHTER]
My goal, in essence, is to
juxtapose musical semitones.
Working binarily
means that my focus
is always percussively-based,
and never orchestral.
That's created, actually, by a
computer program that generates
musical artist bullshit.
[LAUGHTER]
And just as our
forefathers before us,
we look to the unending
horizons of our great nation
with our minds
fixed and our hearts
aflame to rekindle
the dampened sparks
of our collective destiny.
Right?
It's a little bit eloquent
for current happenings
in Washington, but you get
the general drift of that.
So that's old-school
bullshit, and we more or less
know how to see through
that stuff, I think.
But the problem is,
more and more, we're
getting bullshitted with
numbers, with facts,
with figures, with algorithms,
with big data, right?
And so more and more, we're
seeing things like this.
Adjusted for international
exchange rate,
our top-performing global
fund beat the market
in seven of the nine past years.
Is it the same fund
each of those 7/9?
Or did they have some fund that
beat the market, for example?
What does adjusted mean?
While short of
statistical significance
after Bonferroni
correction, the results
underscore a clinically
important effect size
(relative odds of survival
at five years, 1.2)
that challenges the current
therapeutic paradigm?
What does it mean for something
to be clinically important
if it's not statistically
significant, for example?
Interesting question.
The team's
convolutional neural net
extracts the underlying
control logic
from a multiplex
network composed
of the human metabolome,
transcriptome, and proteome.
These three letters
are a very good clue
that you're listening
to bullshit.
[LAUGHTER]
34% of behaviorally
challenged second graders
admit to having sniffed
magic markers at least
once in the past year.
I made that up.
But it's probably bullshit
even if it's true,
because what fraction of
non-challenging second graders
sniffed magic markers?
53%?
We don't know.
I did.
I guess you know that.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
I'm going to turn this
over to you, Jevin.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
