Kudos to The Two Percent Company.

After 10 years of talking about it, last year a colleague and I finally put together a course on critical thinking. (For marketing reasons we call it something else.) We cover the scientific method, pseudoscience, fraud, self-deception, and so forth. Each topic is presented in the context of something fun, like ESP, talking to the dead, quackery, or alien abductions. It is a great course, and the most fun I've ever had standing in front of a classroom.

One reason I felt strongly enough about this material to spend a full summer putting the course together is the crap I see on television every night. (I watch a lot of television, and therefore I am a connoisseur of crap.) Channels that implicitly endorse an educational mission, like The Learning Channel (ha!) or the History Channel, routinely broadcast crap programs like Pet Psychic or In Search of History: Ancient Aliens. My undergraduates are justifiably confused about the distinction between real, pseudo and junk science; the television bombards them with vast quantities of crap ``information" and leaves them to sort fact from crap fiction. This confusion shows up in my statistics classes too.

The first day of Critical Thinking is devoted to remedial reality checks. No, there is no scientific evidence that ESP exists. No, the lie detector does not reliably distinguish between liars and truth-tellers. My students are always astonished at these revelations, and many of them don't believe me, at least at first.

I am thoroughly disgusted by NBC's Medium. Not wanting to make the effort of writing NBC to complain, I instead affirm how stupid the program is to large groups of undergraduates at every opportunity. Will this be as effective in getting it off the air as writing angry letters to NBC executives would be? I don't know. But I feel much better now that the folks at The Two Percent Company have picked up some of my slack with their Allison DuBois week. Well done, folks, and thank you. I plan to make this rant required reading for my students.

And for those of you who think there's nothing wrong with a little light entertainment, imagine that you could be the defendant in this case, or a passenger on this flight, and then get back to me.