Bullshit ability as an honest signal of intelligence
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Bloom quotes Samuel Johnson pg 23: “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times ... You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly.”
pg 159 There is no misandry in Jane Austen or George Eliot or Emily Dickinson. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are not concerned either with upholding or undermining patriarchy. Being vastly intelligent persons, like Rosalind, they do not think ideologically. To read their stories well, you need to acquire a touch of Austen's own wisdom, because she was as wise as Dr. Samuel John-son. Like Johnson, though far more implicitly, Austen urges us to clear our mind of "cant." "Cant," in the Johnsonian sense, means platitudes, pious expressions, group-think. Austen has no use for it, and neither should we. Those who now read Austen "politically" are not reading her at all.
Now Dissembling would seem, to define it generally, to be an affectation of the worst in word and deed and the Dissembler will be disposed rather to go up to an enemy and talk with him than to show his hatred; he will praise to his face one he has girded at behind his back; he will commiserate even his adversary's ill-fortune in losing his case to him. More, he will forget his vilifiers, and will laugh in approval of what is said against him; to such as are put upon and resent it he will speak blandly; any that are in haste to see him are bidden go back home. He never admits he is doing it; and makes pretenses, as that he's but now come upon the scene, or joined the company late, or was ill abed. If you are borrowing of your friend and put him under contribution, he will tell you he is but a poor man; when he would sell you anything, no, it is not for sale; when he would not, why then it is. He pretends he has not heard when he hears, and says he has not seen when he sees; and when he has admitted you right he avers he has no remembrance of it. He'll look into this, doesn't know that, is surprised at the other; this again is just the conclusion he once came to himself. He is forever saying such things as “I don't believe it”; “If so, he must have changed”; “I never expected this”; “Don't tell me”; “Whether to disbelieve you or make a liar of him is more than I can tell”; “Don't you be too credulous.”
- Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE)
~ The Art of War. Sun Tzu (5th century BCE)
Wait, what? Ideology isn't another word for nonsense. It's a system of ideas that supports a social order. You can't write about morality or mores without writing about ideology, because the justifications or criticisms of moral behavior and customs are ideology. That's what the word refers to.
Ultimately, it comes down to jockeying for a limited number (in literature, very limited) of jobs. If people like Bloom can convince us that 'real reading' is not political reading, then people who take a political approach to literature won't get 'real reading' jobs in universities. Which they often don't, not because of this weak reasoning, but because apolitical hires are generally a safer choice.
He's providing rhetorical cover for the supression of political discourse, to the detriment of his own field. It's depressing, but it's the reason why so many inherently apolitical techniques and schools of thought flourished in the post-McCarthy era humanities.
(To clarify, I think his argument is bad on a straight formal level. I also happen to disagree with his position).
Anyway, Bloom was talking about ideological writers, not academics/critics. I just came across this in a recent article[0]:
“The hardest thing in the world to do,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 article for Esquire, “is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out.” Of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he quipped, “see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are.” Hemingway was not discounting the political, merely clarifying its relationship to literature. “Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.”
Be it a piece of fiction, criticism, or journalism, great literature has always contained a social and political dimension with moral ramifications for the society in which it was conceived and written. But its unique role is to explore a version of reality that others may have overlooked—indeed, there may be nothing more subversive than honestly re-creating one’s own experience. However, when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are—their work might succeed in persuading people but, ultimately, it fails to achieve transcendent resonance.
That seemed a great way of describing what it is for a writer to think ideologically in Bloom's sense: "when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are". Then everything slopes the same way, instead of having an endlessly varied terrain. But perhaps you will see in that idea the same "suppression of political discourse" as in Bloom.
I have to give another passage, from the last chapter of Chesterton's Heretics[1] (1905), taking the other side—talking up the art of "ideological writers", and even dealing with anti-ideological critics! Apologies for length:
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and G. B. S., enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. And they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. Mr. Shaw is a good dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good politician. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice and natural genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything else to be is a conventional poet. He desires to be the poet of his people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding their origins, celebrating their destiny. He desires to be Poet Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire. Having been given by the gods originality—that is, disagreement with others—he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking instance of all...is the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy of pure art. He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke. He has since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial. He was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about the London omnibus. He was careless in "The Time Machine," for that dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even cautious, in "Mankind in the Making," for that deals with the day after to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult. But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to be writing "with a purpose." Suppose that any cool and cynical art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think, most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things that stood first were "Soldiers Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and "The Time Machine," by a man called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we want doctrines we go to the great artists. But it is clear from the psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have to go to the doctrinaires.
...I would ask...that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by being taken for artists. No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of his country by the French. Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to enrage us. No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us, it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. If a man comes into Hyde Park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. And an artist is only a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has anything to say.
[0] https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-troub...
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap20
In the general case, especially in the specific case of novels, it's absurd. Novels were born in broadsheet newspapers - the original texts for many of the stand-outs of the genre were published in serial format, right next to adverts for soap and opinion columns. The names he invokes kind of damn his argument rather than support it: George Eliot edited a left wing magazine, Emily Dickinson was published in the Springfield Republican, and so on. I was honestly surprised to find out that Austen was self published: a big point of episotlary novels is that they can be published letter-by-letter in a weekly paper.
Doestoevsky was famous for loving newspapers - not because that's where his novels were published, but because that's where the live written culture of his time was. Bahktin said (iirc) that his novels were pure ideology, in the sense that the raw material of the work was woven from the rants, commonplaces, and opinions they were published side by side with.
Hemmingway is more or less operating at the opposite pole of the spectrum - and 'operating' is the key word here. He had a very specific idea about how to write, what language to use, that is very different than most novelists - part of that is obvious just in the way Hemmingway reads, but part of it is also implicit - while a really typical novelist like Dickens is obsessed with not just how people talk, but also why, what causes they are involved in, arguments they make, Hemmingway is writing much later, when novels were standalone things you didn't get in serial format, and you could make some kind of case for a transcendent, 'high art' novel.
Now, I thought it was cynical because this stuff is obvious to somebody like Bloom. He knows that to read your average novel while ignoring the political context is like listening to Bach and putting your fingers in your ears and going 'lalalala' every time you hit a religious bit. And, when you put Bloom in his political context, he's a man who got his first job in a couple of years after two americans were electrocuted to death for being communist spies, when academics everywhere were being frozen out for having the wrong politics, so you can really see why the incentives were there to go 'lalala' when you hit some of the racy political sections in your average 19th c. novel.
When it comes to varied or sloping terrain, I think it's totally possible to have a varied ideological terrain in a novel. In fact, I think it's unavoidable. I think that's absolutely a good principle when reading novels: to pay attention to at which point they depart from the course set out by the author's various enlistments. That's different to saying a novel is not 'ideolgical' - it's saying a novel is composed of many different and often contradictory ideologies. I think this is definitely a reasonable approach, if you imagine the novel placed right in the middle of a lively comment section of a tabloid.
Oh, that explains a lot.
Here is the results and discussion of the first experiment almost in entirety. I only removed the actual numbers to make the paragraph more readable. You can find the full paragraph in the submitted article.
"Additionally, we find that participants’ bullshit ability was uncorrelated with their willingness to bullshit (i.e., feign knowledge of fake concepts) and their receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit (i.e., endorse meaningless pseudo-profound statements as profound). Furthermore, participants’ willingness to bullshit was negatively associated with scores on the Wordsum, suggesting that those scoring higher on our measures of cognitive ability were less willing to bullshit. Finally, we find that those more willing to bullshit were also more likely to be receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit (i.e., rate pseudo-profound bullshit items higher on profoundness), as well as were less likely to distinguish between meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit and meaningful motivational quotations (bullshit sensitivity: calculated as the difference between pseudo-profound bullshit ratings and ratings of motivational quotations for their profoundness)."
If you have smart friends who are willing to challenge your bullshit occasionally, your bullshitting skill should improve and converge into simply "good intuition". Which is a great skill to have when dealing with actual hard problems.
The first is a verbal test. Correlation should be expected..
The second is a kind of visual puzzle. Among other things, Wikipedia has this to say about it:
> A 2007 study provided evidence that individuals with Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, score higher than other individuals on Raven's tests.[10] Another 2007 study provided evidence that individuals with classic autism, a low-functioning autism spectrum disorder, score higher in Raven's tests than in Wechsler tests. In addition, the individuals with classic autism were providing correct answers to the Raven's test in less time than individuals without autism, although erring as often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
Lots of things could correlate with the ability to solve this kind of puzzle.
So it's really odd to use the adjective "honest" in front of the noun "intelligence." I know there's some mumbo jumbo about what the word means in the paper. But seriously, how can you talk about anything correlating with intelligence when the tools your using are so primitive?
What if the "honest" signal of intelligence is the ability to detect bullshit?
In machine learning research, we have the idea of adversarial algorithms. One algorithm tries to generate convincing bullshit, and the other algorithm tries to differentiate this bullshit compared to the real thing. Resources are spent equally on improving both sides, to the benefit of the larger system.
Perhaps human evolution does the same. People get better at bullshitting to navigate social structures in a more efficient way, and other people get better at calling bullshit to prevent people from navigating those structures TOO efficiently.
Makes sense to me.
The referenced monograph is far less positive about BS, seeing it as an attack on the concept of truth as such.
"It can't be helped, but there's a lot of it about."--Pink Floyd
There are different kinds of intelligence: fluid, crystalized, mechanical, verbal, sensory, data, intuition, social, emotional, and so on.
Maybe it's _______ that's a signal... (body symmetry, comedy, spoken cadence, anxiety, economy of speech, economy of motion, anticipation, etc.)