From the San Francisco Chronicle: “Sense and Sensibility and Science” was started 13 years ago by a team of UC Berkeley professors, including a Nobel laureate, who wanted to give students the tools to combat misinformation and improve their communication skills in an increasingly confusing world. They did not expect the class to become so popular — it’s now taught at a handful of other schools including Harvard and the University of Chicago — or for their lessons to become even more urgent.
The class is part philosophy and part behavioral science. It’s meant to help students make more thoughtful decisions, look and listen past their biases, and embrace humility and the idea that they may not always be right. Assignments include attempting challenging conversations with friends or family. It’s a course, say the professors who run it, with the ultimate goal of bettering the world.
Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for his work studying distant supernovas to determine how the universe is expanding, helped start the class in 2013. He said he did so because he recognized that the tools that scientists use to communicate and share ideas could help people have more productive conversations on all kinds of practical, everyday topics.
“There are very few things we can fix in everybody’s life by getting to the bottom of the Big Bang,” he joked. “In my grandiose optimistic picture,” he said, “eventually everybody is learning this stuff and can go into conversations feeling like their job isn’t to convince everyone that they’re right, but to figure out where they’re making mistakes and hearing everyone out.” ...
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/uc-berkeley-class-saul-perlmutter-22237250.php.
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