It Turns Out You Can Bullshit a Bullshitter After All | Hacker News Reader

It Turns Out You Can Bullshit a Bullshitter After All

digest.bps.org.uk

140 pointssohkamyung160 comments

> The results were clear: while those who scored highly for evasive bullshitting were also better at distinguishing between the genuinely profound and the pseudo-profound statements, the high persuasive bullshitters were poor at this. “Put another way, high persuasive bullshitters appear to interpret/mistake superficial profoundness as a signal of actual profoundness,” the team explains.

Interesting way of breaking down the categories. In my experience, the persuasive bullshitters might not even understand that they’re bullshitting. That is, they drink their own kool-aid, and therefore the line between their pseudo-profundity and reality starts to disappear.

But the study accounted for that by having people self assess how often they would persuasively bullshit and evasively bullshit.

Self-assessment being nearly useless for such a purpose

Might not a bullshitter bullshit the bullshit-assessment?

>That is, they drink their own kool-aid, and therefore the line between their pseudo-profundity and reality starts to disappear.

Largely helped by a society that would deem it too impolite to challenge them on it.

It's worse than that, because the society drinks their kool-aid too. They don't think it's impolite, they heard the challenges, and decided the BSer's idea was best.

Like the buzzword guru that convinces everyone on your team that a javascript server can handle all the requirements of, say, a game streaming server. You can present evidence of the superiority of C++, Java, and Rust until you're blue in the face, but you don't have the gift of gab.

If you're a persuasive BSer, you can go far in life.

I've been faced with a similar situation and my objections were proven right when we went to production. The most galling aspect of the experience was that it meant absolutely nothing. Nothing was fixed and the people who mattered just continued to drink the kool aid. The individual responsible received accolades while the team lost sleep fire fighting the dumpster fire he started. These people are running rampant in the industry and trying to counter their bullshit does absolutely nothing, more often than not it can inflict real damage on one's own career.

I've seen that many time. The BSer was the most senior of the team. The worst part is when everybody tries to save the boat and everybody forgot why it started to sink in the first place so they ask the same person for advice...

There’s a cost to challenging people. It’s not about politeness (for me) rather that I simply expect net negative for challenging BS so only do it when job or family obliges.

>>>That is, they drink their own kool-aid, and therefore the line between their pseudo-profundity and reality starts to disappear.

>Largely helped by a society that would deem it too impolite to challenge them on it.

Actually no. People who drink their own kool-aid generally speak with enormous conviction. Society largely has individuals that cannot access the substance of what is being said, however commitment/conviction ( how ever misplaced) come across very clearly and that is valued.

My thoughts are that is people like these who aid evil to thrive. Like the say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I’ll note that the researchers found this category to have “less insight into their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours,” which is absolutely not the description of a person who is capable of receiving feedback.

I've seen this in action: someone bullshitting in a group until they believe their own bullshit.

That is my experience as well. The people who lie so much, so compulsively to the point of a narcissistic personality disorder, drink their own kool-aid. They are manipulating themselves with the stupid as much as everybody else they lie to. Perhaps this is due to a combination of frequent life failures, low confidence, and low ability of critical examination. That low ability of critical examination that permits the self delusion also opens them to undue manipulation from others.

How you talk changes how you think.

The scary part: Most won't remember the change.

I guess, but that seems weird because then it'd be your brain wanting to change how it thinks itself through speech

To all the company founders here... sometimes the difference between bullshit and amazing prescience is just success.

I don’t mean lying about the data when communicating, but prioritizing some signals while downplaying, dismissing or overriding many others. Did pg says founders need to be somewhat delusional or they’d give up?

The two may be related. I think it's hard to convincingly bullshit yourself - your brain knows what you're doing. But if you successfully bullshit other people, some of them will start to reflect your bullshit back at you - providing external validation for it. At some point your brain may forget that the only reason people around you believe something is because you tricked them into it, and you start truly believing it yourself.

This is used in various belief systems to instill and reinforce deeply held beliefs in the absence of any evidence apart from the manufactured social proof. If one is experiencing doubts, they are told to try telling others that what they doubt is actually true. One example of the phrasing that might be used: "You have to share your testimony to strengthen it."

No doubt the technique of manufacturing consent through reflected BS is pervasive elsewhere too, in marketing, politics, etc.

An argument of Elephant in the Brain (https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/) is that a key component of bullshitting others (paraphrasing, somewhat) is that you must also bullshit yourself, in order to be convincing.

> I think it's hard to convincingly bullshit yourself

That is entirely dependent upon the personality and goal of a given person.

For some people the brain knows what it wants to know, such as selective data necessary for group conformance. For some other people the brain knows only what it sees and hears. For some different people will doubt what they see and hear until after several iterations as to meld conflicting reports.

There is a common expression for people who commonly and easily lie to themselves: Talking a big game. In that case everybody knows its bullshit except for the person talking.

> your brain knows what you're doing

Not really, you believe it yourself. You don't put up much resistance, it's just kind of "this is convenient, therefore it must be the truth, and these pesky contradicting facts probably have some other good explanation".

If you believe it yourself. What I'm saying is, I don't think you can think yourself into believing something on purpose, when you didn't believe it before, and know that thing is wrong. You'll need a round-trip through other people (external validation), for your brain to stop seeing "motivated reasoning" tag on arguments.

> Perhaps this is due to a combination of frequent life failures, low confidence, and low ability of critical examination.

Ah, nice combination :) Purely anecdotal, I once had very low confidence, but could be very critical to myself. This broke me down quite bad, this was not a good combination. Only after 30 I would learn to not be so negative in my criticism, but be more nice to myself, and I thought I had learned a lot. Just the last few years I learned to just observe situations and myself, and not judge so much, not negative and not positive. Just like I learned from meditation.

I can imagine when having low confidence, it might be so much easier to avoid being critical to yourself. Ofcourse you might then also learn to avoid observing yourself, it feels almost the same. So then you are stuck in some path where you might never get out, you just keep on doing what you did.

Could you explain a bit more how you got out of that? Was it just introspection or did you do other things? Asking for a friend.

> In my experience, the persuasive bullshitters might not even understand that they’re bullshitting. That is, they drink their own kool-aid, and therefore the line between their pseudo-profundity and reality starts to disappear.

This is the essence of Dunning–Kruger, in my experience. Very good point.

I suspect we are dealing with two populations here: those who think bullshit is a valid mode of argumentation, and those who know it is not, but use it anyway. Those in the latter category know that their bullshit can be called, so they are only likely to use it when they are fairly confident that it will not be recognized as such by their target audience, or when they consider the stakes justify the risk.

Politicians and political commentators, trial lawyers and PR flacks come to mind.

That's the difference between sociopaths and clueless, I think

As a confirmed loser, I appreciate the corollary!

As someone oscillating between loser and clueless, I appreciate the reference..

All Caca del Toro to me.

In my experience all true bullshitters drink their own brew. What came first the self or external delusion?

> In my experience, the persuasive bullshitters might not even understand that they’re bullshitting.

But if so, it seems disingenuous to call it “bullshitting”, since that word caries the negative connotation of purposeful deceit, and not of simple wrongbeing. The latter can be considered either neutral or also negative, but strictly less so if you desire truthfulness.

The best liars tend to be able to believe their own lies in a live setting

When I learned to play poker with some "semi-pro" players at the table, they asked what I did I said I worked in security and cryptography, which is what got me into playing. When they said, "oh, you're a math guy?" I said, "not really, more code, but the problems I deal with at work are edge cases where assumptions about math break down, for example like how statistical models of card shuffling assume an even, normal distribution, which is great in theory, but doesn't bear out in practice."

This created enough uncertainty and second guessing in their minds about their own odds calculations on each hand that with a bit of aggression and beginners randomness, I was able to take a few of them out.

I wasn't doing better calculations, I was just adding uncertainty to theirs. I still don't know much about playing cards, but that is how you bullshit bullshitters.

That's beautiful. It sounds like you were using the standard odds calculations?

I'm not sure I get it. How do you know this created uncertainty and second guessing?

He said that he knows that the deck is not shuffled randomly.

I mean how does he know that this had influence on the semi pro players. It just seems unlikely to me that they would start second guessing after that fact.

Math.

Or he might be a human being with feelings and perceptions, however subjective they may be.

It just seems unlikely to cause anyone semi pro to start second guessing themselves. So I would like to understand how did this manifest.

This is like an example of persuasive bullshitting from the article!

Poker amateurs play badly regardless of reason. Poker professionals wouldn't adjust their strategy based on some random guy at the table. The sample size is incredibly small for poker (as you said) but saying that the uncertainty you added affected the outcome is tenuous.

Additionally the best live poker players are entertainers in terms of they want to make you feel valued and that you have a chance so you come back and play more. They have a concrete financial interest in making you feel smart, funny, and competent. A true live poker pro always laughs when the worst player tells a joke and always says 'whoa that's interesting' after the worst player tells a story.

It's possible I didn't know the difference between winning and losing and it was an attribution error. My experience with people in business who lie about data and bullshit about crypto suggested even though the players were way more experienced, they could be persuaded they needed to be cautious by someone with a "deeper" background.

Anyway, I ended up splitting the pot in that tournament, so lucky for sure, and maybe the guy I split it with was so good he could use a beginner at the table against the others as a shield, but in a game of confidence and perceptions, bringing in data points nobody else has is destabilizing.

I've got to call bullshit on this as well. No one is going to lose confidence due to something like that and results of one game with small crowd are very luck dependant. It feels like you won at roulette and are attributing your win to something genius you think you did.

Plausible, with the slight exception it was on purpose, and breaking peoples balls on their mystical folk understandings of why they think they're good is very much a competitive strategy. See sports psychology for examples. The way to bullshit a bullshitter is to seize the initiative and give them an out where they save face. Nothing brilliant, but it's funny, and standard in sales. A bit of charisma goes a long way.

I've absolutely been the mark in other situations, but that one, I thought it was intentional enough to share.:)

Worth a read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

    "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it"

Sometimes when reading comments below articles (about vaccination for instance) I wonder if it would be more effective to stoop down to the anti-vaxxers level instead of trying to refute their claims. Just pump out loads of exaggerated pro-vaxx stuff.

That's clever but there is one reason I think this would not work. Most pro-vaxx don't (and don't want to) spend their entire days thinking about why they are pro-vaxx. Being anti-vaxxer is a lifestyle.

Sadly, antivaxxers already believe that scientific findings are "exaggerated pro-vaxx stuff".

Which is exactly why this would probably work. It's all bullshit on both sides (in their view), so it might as well be balanced bullshit. Right now, the bullshit evidence points to potential for horrific outcomes, not worth it!

I think a similar dynamic is behind Trump's rise to power. First you confuse the people, them you can tell them what to think.

Every anti-vaxxer I came across had a history involving their kids reaction to vaccines. You may call them bullshitters all you want, but they are incredibly more motivated than you given above mentioned history.

Every one of them had a history of their kids having an adverse reaction to vaccines, you mean? That's quite a different circle than I've swam in. The anti-vaxxers I've known all adopt their beliefs based on some quasi-religious, libertarian, self-sufficiency ideology and indeed have withheld vaccines from their children.

Whenever I argued with them they would invariably claim to be familiar with hundred of peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the dangers. When pressed on the issue, one of them finally did dig up this trove of papers for me. Because I'm an idiot, I actually did carefully review and refute them, so I can say from personal experience that the "orders of magnitude" adage is pretty true. Of course, after admitting that maybe these papers weren't the best materials to prove his point, he decided to pivot to another website that would surely contain all the "proof" I need. There is no arguing. They have a heap of bullshit and don't intend to make their beliefs based on critical analysis.

If you're curious about how I wasted several evenings reading anti-vax papers you can read my analysis here [1]. It's almost invariably about a disproven link between thimerosal and autism spectrum disorder or random non-scientists hucksters trying to sell crystal healing powers or some horse shit.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19IFB_2dzq6Gb5z6igjsIEFMh...

I did not say everyone of them, I said everyone that I personally came across. I do not swim in antivaxxers. Are we testing our bs powers?

When I said "every one of _them_" I was referring to every one of them that you have met. Not implying that you meant all of them in existence. I'm surprised by your experience, because growing up in an Evangelical community in the south anti-vaxxers were a dime a dozen, but I've never met anyone whose children were harmed by vaccines.

Possible a timing/age issue. When I first encountered the antivaxers, it was in the late 90s with parents of children on the autistic spectrum grasping at whatever cause they could. Now it is pretty much just the kind of people that are attracted to ideas like climate skepticism or crystal healing. And they all have a bogeyman like evil corporations or the government.

That is exactly it.

Oh interesting. I don’t know many religious people. I grew up in the USSR.

Much of the former USSR is the domain of superstitious and religious. Antivaxx is also mainstream there.

Maybe, but back then we never even thought about it. Some shots we have taken actually leave scars.

eloisius, I applaud you for your efforts. You certainly appear to have done it sincerely. ( I had a cursory glance at the doc you put)

But there is a fundamental problem, you are looking at numbers gleaned from 'studies' and IMHO mostly they revel nothing unless the study was done carefully, intelligently and with integrity. All these traits are missing at large in the scientific community. A broken clock is correct twice a day. Also factor in politics, something which I did not early on, most of us with a technical bent of mind are naively un-aware of this.

Regarding autism + vaccines, I never looked into it. But I have looked at (and mostly listened to people who I think are credible have dug up numbers from the CDC website) and my conclusion is that for most part they are generally useless, perhaps 1 or 2 vaccines out of the 30 or so are truly effective. There are also instances of clear harm where populations what were vaccinated fell ill and the ones that we not vaccinated did not fall ill. Finally anecdotally, the people who most certainly get the flu are the ones that were vaccinated. Ofcourse people will dismiss that by saying anecdotes are not data.

Where ever a vaccine did appear to have succeeded, there were other factors in play. A clear case of (well-intentioned) people who drink their own kool-aid believe that their efforts are paid off.

I reread what you posted a couple of times, and I still have no idea what your point is. Vaccines are or are not harmful? If they are harmful, would you assert any specific claims and provide evidence please?

Well, the burden is proof is on the vaccine to show that is near completely safe and that it is clearly providing a benefit, isn't it? ( not the other way round where the burden of proof is put on someone to prove that it not harmful).

The point that I'm trying to make is this - to the extent I have looked I see no clear benefit, and in some cases there appears to be a clear harm. So why bother taking it?

>Vaccines are or are not harmful?

My guess - only one 1 or 2 are effective, rest are either useless or harmful. These are ball park figures based on fair amount of reading/listening, I could be wrong. But it begs the question, why should it be so hard to see clear benefits? One has only so much time to investigate these things, I did it years back and have moved on. My default today is to mistrust anything that medicine has to offer. ( it used to be the other way round)

Also don't forget to look at the drugs Thalidomide and Vioxx - should give you a glimpse of the how murky the industry is. These are IMO not isolated incidents. That should at least tip you off in the right direction.

Last, but not the least - if a vaccine has clear benefits ( based on broader set of parameters that I would consider) , I would take it, who in their right mind does not want to protect their health?

" to the extent I have looked I see no clear benefit"

The elimination/near elmination of polio? rubella? measles? Soon COVID? Etc..

" the burden is proof is on the vaccine to show that is near completely safe"

They do.

"My guess - only one 1 or 2 are effective, rest are either useless or harmful ... I could be wrong."

Yes, completely wrong.

"don't forget to look at the drugs Thalidomide ..."

There are thousands upon thousands of drugs. Some are going to fail, many will be misrepresented. Like everything in life. It doesn't mean they don't work.

"My default today is to mistrust anything that medicine has to offer."

This is irrationally conspiratorial, indicative of a broader problem.

"who in their right mind does not want to protect their health?"

The above statements are not so 'right of mind' unfortunately.

There are no Lizard People trying to control us, and most of the people in non-political power are doing their jobs reasonably on some level. There are some systematic failures (i.e. Walmart over-subscribing oxycontin) but most of us are not surprised when that happens.

Approved vaccines are overwhelmingly more effective than they are detrimental, i.e. the 'balance of outcomes' is monumentally positive.

>The elimination/near elimination of polio? rubella? measles? Soon COVID? Etc..

All of them have alternative explanations not found in mainstream media. ( and no I won't put forth the material for you. You will have to look for it)

>>"My guess - only one 1 or 2 are effective, rest are either useless or harmful ... I could be wrong."

>Yes, completely wrong.

So I presume you looked/read at many of these vaccines closely, way beyond what is found is mainstream media?

>most of the people in non-political power are doing their jobs reasonably on some level.

This is where I have changed my mind over the years. People may be sincere but not competent.

Out of curiosity, do you believe in anything publicly considered a "conspiracy theory"? (For example, "9/11 was an inside job", "Holocaust wasn't real/deaths were unintentional due to disease", "Sandy Hook shooting wasn't real", " COVID-19 isn't real/isn't nearly as dangerous as reported", "US politicians rape and murder children in Satanic rituals".)

meowface, most things that you mentioned above cannot be personally verified ( except for the holocaust and COVID 19), so 'believe' is a strong word. It's simple - I don't trust the media or gov anymore. It's difficult to segregate fact from fiction.

With certain aspects of medicine/health it is relatively easy to verify, if one listens to the renegade doctors, experiment with diets. ( the US dietary guideline pyramid - can actually be inverted, I'm not kidding)

There is a larger point I'm trying to make: it's easy to believe the media, no work is needed, but to investigate take time/effort/perseverance which I have done to the best possible extent.

At the risk of taking this thread further off-topic from OP, I just want to point out that in the two posts you've made here, you've provided a timely example of exactly what I described: you made vague references to 'credible' sources without citing them, included some authoritative-sounding numbers, but have yet to make a single claim that could be either proven or refuted. You try to make it sound like you're just a skeptical rationalist. Although, I am sure when you are amongst more suggestible people you speak with even greater authority and make stronger claims about the dangers of vaccines. That is to say, pure bullshit!

I don't normally do this, but based on keywords you've inexplicably crammed into your HN profile and a cursory reading of your own websites and posts that you've linked to from there, you fit the bill exactly. Paranoiac, self-congratulatory screeds about the deluded masses that you've somehow managed to emerge from as some kind of enlightened individualist. Seriously, consider how much effort you are exerting to construct this elaborate justification for your conditions. You would be much better off if you just focused on improving your station in life without positioning yourself as John Galt amongst a world gone astray.

Thank you for your psychoanalysis of me. Just what I was looking for.

What is the libertarian argument against vaccination?

That you should not be legally required to vaccinate. I suspect this to be a smokescreen for the usual nonsense but, apropos of OP, they may believe it's their real reason.

I imagine that in order to be an anti-vaxxer and not crumble under the crushing weight of cognitive dissonance one would have to believe that claims about the benefits of vaccines already are loads of exaggerated pro-vaxx stuff that has been pumped out by (Big Pharma|The Government|Russians|Illuminati|Lizard People|Whatever other crazy thing).

As in 'let's spread a rumour that he shagged a pig! But who will believe this nonsense? It doesn't matter,but it will fun to see how they'll refute it!'.

Badly, it seems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate

That's a relatively recent incarnation of a much older story. As I recall in one of Hunter S Thompson's books he accuses LBJ (or possibly Nixon, it's a long time since I read it) of spreading rumors one of his political enemies fucked pigs. Whichever dead president it was was quoted as saying, "I know it's not true, I just want to make th son of a bitch deny it".

What's interesting with this approach that it doesn't even take that much effort once the seed of doubt is planted. I remember back in the day,I was attending this party and after having a few beers,I started looking for some entertainment. My eyes stumbled upon a CD case 'Eros Ramazzotti'. I exclaimed, and told to one of the the friends who was standing close enough that it's a cheap knock-off. 'How would you know', he asks? Well, for starters, the name is written incorrectly. It's correct, I'm a fan of his music and have multiple CDs, it's definitely like this. Nope it's not, it's 'Razamotti'. He gets puzzled.. then a few others join, including the owner of the place. Fast forward 10 min or so and I've already convinced some of them. Others start 'remembering' and even supporting my claim. Eventually I tell everyone I'm just winding them up,but people were very surprised how quickly they started to doubt their knowledge.

Yes, it is like cleaning an oil spill.

It’s a natural extension of entropy only being created, and never destroyed.

I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'

— James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

As an aside, Boswell also noted that James Grainger removed the line “Come muse, let us sing if rats” in his poem The Sugar Cane because he discovered that when he uttered these words his audience dissolved into laughter.

Maybe an internet led edit of Ratatouille can add it to the beginning of the movie.

What kind of social engineering did this guy do to get a wikipedia page and a whole "law" after his name so people can quote it forever.

We've had proverbs for millennia about this. But no, let's use a silly Italian name to make it sound academic or something.

No social engineering was needed I suppose. This image: https://truth-sandwich.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ziobra... done the rounds on social media for a while and someone mustered up the courage to create a Wikipedia article about it. It's basically an Internet meme, not really a law. I use the image sometimes in heated debates where two people throw peer reviewed academic 'links' at each other for hours to prove their point(s).

You’ll need to spend order of magnitude more energy refuting this page to make a difference here I’m afraid

Please share a few of those proverbs, possibly some with nice anglo-saxon words in them, least we get overwhelmed by too much latinate pomposity

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/bullshit

My favorite:

> “Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you” ― Lemmy Kilmister

EDIT: /s

It should be noted the high refute energy isn’t due to the error or poor logic of the argument in place. It is due to the trust and faith placed in that argument no matter how faulty or flawed that argument may be to third parties.

It’s also why most people won’t bother to entertain the stupid unless convinced or positively influenced by it. For example many people find the flat earth argument clearly absurd, but they won’t challenge a flat earther on this even with simple obvious data points.

Precisely. Taking the flat earther example, if their able to miss so many obvious data points (some they can observe themselves with their own eyes!) then why would anything you say convince them? Someone who is capable of being talked out of believing bullshit is less likely to have falllen for it in the first place.

How many people could actually refute a flat earther? Or does the average person believe in a globular earth because “science” without detail or just because “everybody” knows it to be true?

At this point there are plenty of pictures of the earth, other celestial bodies, airplanes going round the earth and what not, so that anybody can see it and it doesn’t require any trigonometry or scientific knowledge. Of course one might not have personally flown around the earth or been part of an operation to take a picture from space, but the same can be said about anything. For instance how would you prove that your heart pumps blood? Have you seen it personally?

All you have to do is gain a few hundred feet of elevation on a hike and watch the horizon.

While anybody _can_ make such arguments, as you describe the evidence is abundant, do they in practice? The question I was poorly raising was: how many people can make a coherent argument making use of such evidence? I suspect many people have beliefs about the world not because they've reasoned it out, but because of the general cultural consensus. And thus if you critically questioned them they might struggle to come up up with the supporting evidence as you so easily did. What percent of populace is like that? Am I just be an elitist or is that a sizable cohort?

I've personally stood on the Michigan side of lake michigan and seen only the tops of the skyscrapers in Chicago while everything else was hidden behind the horizon. My dad showed me on a trip to Michigan when I was less than 10 and even then I understood the effect. You can even see it yourself on a clear day of you get a window seat on your next flight.

That's not even mentioning experiments you can do yourself right here on the surface measuring shadows to estimate the circumference.

Likewise, there are countless images of the Earth from space, and even the moon. Some outdoor will say they're all dates, but at that point if every single image of the Earth is faked, then how can you trust anything? That would require a conspiracy so vast that your own parents are probably in on it and you should trust no one.

I don’t know if this a serious comment or not but there have been photos of the earth from space available for decades. These photos show a globe, not a plane. Unless the flat earther can show a photo of a flat earth from space, they have been refuted.

I was being serious. But perhaps I wasn't being clear. I'm certain _I_ and probably most everyone on HN could refute a flat-earther (or at least present a coherent case that undoubtable would be ignored). The question I was raising was how many in the "general populace" could do the same.

I probably shouldn't be at this point, but I continue to be amazed by the inability of those I converse with (outside of folks in my tech-circle) to justify or explain basic mechanisms of how the universe functions - especially those that are usually taught at the secondary-school level.

I see! Thx for clarifying.

Can’t it be both? Surely it’s more difficult to navigate your way out of a convoluted, multi-layered false understanding than an erroneous belief about a simple fact?

The thing with flat-earthers, covid-doesnt-exist or stolen-vote believers or what not is that they often have a collection of refutations ready for their opponents. And in my experience this often cause the opponents to exit the discussion because they now are one argument late and it becomes even harder to bring anything to the table and the effect is amplified with each refutation. The worst is when they use their list of examples, people cancelled, doctors that believe covid is a lie or whatever premade list they have. My take now is to not fight windmills, they will believe something even crazier soon enough and even forget about that one or just tame it enough to say "i'm not convinced but it is what it is"...

Exactly. This makes fake news, propaganda etc a denial of service attack enabled by freedom of speech. The freedom comes at a cost.

This is one of the most scary insinuations I've read in a while.

Careful, friend. This road does not lead where you think it leads...

Not entirely sure what you mean. Just in case you think so, I am not arguing for curbs on free speech. Its just another unhappy fact of life that freedom of speech by its very nature opens itself up to DDOS. The protectors of free speech have a much harder task on their hands than those who want to exploit it.

Pointing out that freedom comes at a cost doesn't necessarily mean they want freedom to be reduced. The principle is that the benefits almost always outweigh the costs.

I would not say that it's freedom of speech that makes it a DoS attack possibility. We've had freedom of speech for a while without having disinformation going rampant, because the distribution costs of bullshit were still about as large as those of valid facts, so even if creating the bullshit was cheaper than creating a rebuttal based on facts, the total cost of creation plus distribution was roughly equal.

It's the modern (social) media environment and its inherent ways of allocating attention that creates the extreme asymmetry in distribution costs, where it's now cheaper than ever to distribute attention-grabbing bullshit, but still pretty expensive to distribute comparatively-boring facts.

> We've had freedom of speech for a while without having disinformation going rampant

I'm confident that if you look at archived US publications going back to before the revolution you'll find rampant "misinformation" the whole time.

I'm confident that speculation—no matter how well-intentioned—is a form of misinformation.

In case it wasn't clear that wasn't the rhetorical "you" as in "one," but rather a suggestion that parent personally ought to spend some time learning about 17th, 18th, and 19th century publications by actually reading them and seeing how fast and loose they played with the truth to achieve desired political and economic goals.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Then your employer sees the shitshow, fears the resonance and things become more intimate than just cancelling the show. Saying “oh, it’s only true between you and the govt” effectively revokes the claimed right in a society. As a result, only those can speak freely who agree with a vocal majoriry. But that just seems like an obvious default, not a progressive achievement. Or is that wrong?

It seems that people mistakenly cry 'censorship!' when most of the time cancel culture is really plain moderation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation

> most of the time cancel culture is really plain moderation

Most moderation ends with people losing their jobs? Really?

That would make vigilante justice, lynch mobs, all the way up to genocide examples of extreme "moderation". How do you differentiate moderation that kills someone from moderation that silences someone, kicks them out of their community, and costs them their jobs? They differ only in degree.

It's pretty easy actually, noone gets murdered or maimed.

A free society necessarily must permit some degree of what could be considered vigilantism - even if the vigilantism is intended to restrict someone or something else's freedom in some way. I'd call this the "meta-paradox of tolerance".

The difference in degree you mention is the boundary between legally (and sometimes morally) acceptable and unacceptable forms of vigilantism.

The summary:

> Some earlier work has suggested that better liars are also better at detecting lies. But as the team notes, bullshit isn’t quite the same, as it falls just short of outright deception.

> Recently, researchers have begun to treat bullshitting as having two separate dimensions. “Persuasive bullshitting” is motivated by a desire to impress or persuade. “Evasive bullshitting” is different — as a “strategic circumnavigation of the truth”, it’s the sort that a politician might engage in when trying to cover up a mistake, for example.

> The team found that people who reported engaging in more persuasive bullshitting were more receptive to all forms of bullshit (pseudo-profound, pseudo-scientific and fake news). However, higher scores for evasive bullshitting were not related to susceptibility to the first two forms of bullshit, and were actually associated with less susceptibility to believing fake news.

I'm still not sure what the distinction between lying and bullshitting is.

Easy. The paragraphs that you have quoted does not say anything in particular but it is long and looks informative. That is bullshit.

I am living in America. That is a lie.

I’ll take a crack at it. Lying is when I say something and hope that you’ll believe what I’m saying, while bullshit is saying something hoping you’ll believe something else, either indirectly or transitively.

If I wanted to you to think I went to Stanford, I could say I went to Stanford, which is a lie, or talk about how much I enjoyed my time studying in the Palo Alto area, which is bullshitting.

Maybe they consider lying as uniform pathology and with bullshitting they make an effort to categorise into "presuasive" and "evasive", but they could be as well defined other way around imho.

Thinking about it more there may be something I don't get about it because if you think about concepts like "while lie" - it is category of a lie, however doesn't belong to bullshitting category, there is something about incentive that may be distingishing between two.

I would say persuasive bullshitters probably includes the perhaps small group of people who have realized that everything people say (themselves included) contains at least some small measure of bullshit (however you define it), and that it isn't necessarily intentional or malicious, and that it doesn't fully invalidate the statement. Thus, they are willing to confess to engaging in bullshitters, and while quick to recognize it in others, they are generous enough to play along for what truth might lie within.

Bullshitting is manipulative storytelling. Some of what a bullshitter says is true. Some of it they even believe is true. Some of it they desperately want to be true. What's outright false they would say is unimportant and deflect rather than argue about.

But they're saying it to get something they want or avoid something they don't want, and they'll tell any remotely plausible story to make that happen. Bullshitters change the story to fit the situation, often in real time as it develops.

Lying is more straightforward in that the liar is saying something they specifically know is not true to deceive the listener.

Perhaps they're bullshitting, and it's one of those fake studies? :)

> I'm still not sure what the distinction between lying and bullshitting is.

Logically there isn't one. The difference is in context and motivation.

When I was a kid I had a problem with bullshitting, like when I told my friends that my dad owned a helicopter. I wasn't trying to scam them, I just wanted to be accepted and seem cool. But I got over it as soon as my brain was able to notice what a stupid thing it was to do. "You don't gotta lie to hang out."

FWIW, it seems to em like this study is just showing that stupid people are stupid. It's arrested development to be a bullshitter after, say, 12 or so, surely?

Bullshitting does not require knowledge of the truth. Liars know they are telling a falsehood. Bullshitters don’t care whether something is factual or not, as long as it serves their rhetoric purpose.

First, the distinction made between persuasive and evasive bullshitting strikes me as vacuous. Evasion is a species of persuasion so it's not two types, but rather a contains relation. On to bullshit then.

Harry Frankfurt wrote an entertaining little book on the subject[1]. To boil it down, the liar is concerned with the truth, but makes it serve his ends by hiding it. On the other hand the bullshitter is concerned with persuasion and gives no particular consideration to the truth value of his claims, so long as they persuade. As such well-crafted bullshit is designed to sound plausible and elicit the sensation of truth.

For example, someone running a pump and dump scheme with a stock is liable to be bullshitting. The reasons he gives for buying may well be true, but he doesn't care either way so long as the rubes drive his shares up.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit

Lying is when you know A to be true but claiming A is false.

Bullshitting is not knowing enough about A but making claims about A regardless.

> I'm still not sure what the distinction between lying and bullshitting is.

Might I recommend On Bullshit, a delightful essay/short book on this and other bullshit-related questions. It’s been a while since I read it but I recall the distinction being (at least in that essay) that lying is very deliberately not telling the truth, while with bullshit, truth is irrelevant.

I might even go to say that persuasive bullshitters have something to gain from believing and taking in and joining the other persuasive bullshit. There is likely also lot of group dynamics in play here.

While evasive bullshit and outright lying is much more goal driven cover oneself and others bullshit is likely be harmful...

> I might even go to say that persuasive bullshitters have something to gain from believing and taking in and joining the other persuasive bullshit.

To bring the conversation closer to what's usually on this website, AI in cars has been a bullshit discourse for at least five years now (since I've started to more closely follow the conversation), and what you're saying is correct, many of the people that spat out said bullshit had direct financial gains from it via investors' money who wanted to trust that bullshit.

"People are full of shit man, really. But I don't mind people being full of shit I just don't like when people bring their full of shitness to me, right? And try to make me feel uncomfortable about how I'm full of shit to make me full of shit like them so that they feel more comfortable about how full of shit they are. you understand what I'm saying? I didn't really understand it myself but I know someone understood what I'm talking about." -- Patrice O'Neal

Two reasons come to mind:

If you can't see through bullshit, you might think others can't either, and are thus more likely to bullshit yourself.

If you can't see through bullshit, you may think others are actually accomplishing some of the things they claim, and will be more likely to embellish your own story to "keep up".

I see a pattern where persuasive bullshitters surround themselves with persuasive bullshitters.

At my work, we call it the sales team.

> If you can't see through bullshit, you may think others are actually accomplishing some of the things they claim.

The converse is probably also true. I.e. if someone tells you something that is true but you can't tell whether they are bullshitting you, you might feel more justified in bullshitting or embellishing the truth yourself.

A third: many pathological bullshitters don't even realize they're making stuff up.

Oh how I'd love to see their list of profound statements and the pseudo profound bullshit!

Page 17 of the appendix: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSu...

Some of this seems a bit arbitrary. “Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.” While poorly worded, it contains a kernel of truth that you can only express your creativity by being in good health. However it is put into the bs pile. The non bs section contains motivational quotes which are popular but are bs mostly. What is the definition of bsing? Thinking out loud? Not being accurate? Intentionally stringing together words to sound impressive?

I don't get this one, that is supposedly a real quote - "Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you." Seems pseudo-profound to me, unless I'm missing something.

In both art and love, the person who experiences them perceives links between their own identity or characteristics and the art/object of love, or sees these characteristics projected back at them through the art/process of loving.

The motivational quotes can be bs in a practical sense, but they are not bs in a literal sense: the sentences have meaning in and of themselves.

In this case, the rewording of the example you cited actually grants meaning to the sentence that it doesn't have but that we accidentally interpret it as having because the sentence is quite close to a meaningful sentence

I get the sense that the people who self reported as being good persuasive bullshitters probably aren’t fooling people to the extent they think they are. They’re just not aware of how transparent they are. And if those same people are also susceptible to fake news and pseudoscience, it kind of adds up to them just not being very smart.

Or perhaps, it adds up to them not being the kind of people who always take two ideas they have in their heads and test them to see if they are consistent with each other. After all, it takes work to try to figure out if you’re actually seeing the truth. And it takes work to realize you’re wrong about something and to update your mental model of the world. Maybe accepting/sowing bullshit is just easier.

If I’m trying to convince someone they’re wrong about something, the way I try to do it is to find a contradiction in their position. I point out two things they believe that can’t both be true at the same time and then I let them trace out the consequences on their own. But evidently for high bullshit individuals, that might not work, since they might not see self-contradictory ideas as a problem. How would you convince those people of anything? I’m not sure.

>They’re just not aware of how transparent they are.

Conversely, we might not actually be aware of the true masters at work precisely because of their skill and the fact that we can catch the novices

>How would you convince those people of anything? I’m not sure.

The same way they convince their marks: create the impression of yourself as a strong and confident leader and they will form an internal story as to why it makes sense to follow and believe what you say

Oh how interesting! I’m trying to figure out how susceptible I am to manipulation by a “strong and confident leader”.

My immediate reaction is that I instantly dislike the kind of people you’re talking about- I can think of lots times when a tall handsome person with a self satisfied smirk has spoken in a loud voice and I hated them immediately. Once I was in one of those corporate cheerleading sessions in a big room and the CEO of the company walks in- tall guy, immaculately dressed. Beautiful skin. Just flew over from Europe. He says how “blown away by the enthusiasm” he is. Shows a video of himself walking among the people, talking to lowly cashiers and baggage clerks. I could barely restrain myself from throwing a chair at him. I sometimes regret that I didn’t, the loss of my job might have been worth it to get a shot in at that rotten bastard. I thought, of course they acted enthusiastic around you, they felt compelled to. I feel the same way about the Cuomos and Trumps of the world. I’ve had the same reaction to sales and marketing pitches. I instinctively hate them on a deep, subconscious level, and that’s not too strong a word. I suppose this must be an atypical reaction though? I can’t imagine reacting any other way. It’s not just that I think those kinds of figures are not good people; they activate my fight or flight response. They feel like a threat.

Are there really people out there who like those kind of people? I just find that idea so baffling. But yet I do see all sorts of people who appear to do just that. I don’t understand it.

To clarify, the low-skill "persuasive bullshit" artists (as categorized in the article in opposition to the evasive type) you mentioned respond well to that sort of thing, and so do the various members of the public that they are able to convince. I happen to share your dislike of that sort of thing... but in works in various contexts. And that dislike we share is not atypical, simply less common.

What I mean is that they are not the only type of bullshitter. It's seductive to think that we can catch all of them like pokemon because we can identify the lowest hanging fruit.

Anecdotally, I have met some people I would describe as true masters of the craft and it's an experience that completely changed the way I see that sort of thing. It ha shaken my confidence in my own observational skills.

I see what you’re saying, I could certainly be overconfident in my own ability to spot masters of the craft, as you put it.

We know since at least 384BC[1] that the best strategy against a bullshitter is to bullshit.

You can’t win against someone who cheats and takes freedom with the rules while you follow these rules.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthydemus_(dialogue)

But does this article pass the Frankfurt test?

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

What is the Frankfurt test?

The tl;dr from the book at the link is that the point of BS isn't so much to amuse or mislead, rather, real BS is an attack on the concept of truth as such.

My thoughts exactly! I read 'On Bullshit' a while back and it struck me as an hilarious thesis attacking the social sciences in general. There is some type of recursive irony going on here.

There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with a BSer. Unfortunately I have found that a lot of effective BSers are actually pretty smart which makes sense since they tend to have some credentials to back up their arguments.

The other hard part about dealing with BSers at work is that oftentimes they are saying the types of things management wants to hear, ie "yes of course our team can build an entire hardware product in 8 months, it's easy!".

“Evasive bullshitting” - that’s a new term for me. I definitely have done that. It’s where the truth hurts, but you don’t want to “lie” so you base something in truth. But it’s still lying, just makes you feel better because if called on it, you have at least some plausible deniability.

I am curious how they determined the subjects tested were bullshitters.

Did they get to know them enough to realise they bullshit a lot?

Or did they ask them if they were good bullshitters? If so, then maybe they missed those who are bullshitters but either don’t know it, or won’t admit to it.

It makes sense, one group doesn't know shit and the other does and the rest is implied by it.

I might believe it more if I was given access to their surveys and data.

this article is ripe for an ig Nobel award. well done to the authors. they should be nominated.

This is some serious bullshit.

The study is paywalled, but since it seems to based on surveys I’ll link to an article about why research based on surveys are often bullshit:

https://carcinisation.com/2020/12/11/survey-chicken/

the linked BJSP paper is paywalled

what's the effect size?

http://psyarxiv.com/5c2ej/download says the Unpaywall extension (works on Firefox, probably also on Chrome). Great thing to have installed.

However, before getting carried away, let's not forget the results are based on made-up scales, bad, unbalanced alternatives and online surveys, Mechanical Turk in this case. The sample is guaranteed to be unrepresentative, because "[o]nly those who had completed a minimum of 500 surveys and had at least a 97% MTurk HIT approval rating were eligible to participate" and 62% had at least a bachelor degree.

Best r they report is .39.

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