We Live in the Age of the Bullshitter
currentaffairs.org
currentaffairs.org
The dawn of the "modern era" in the west is attributed to the rise of Jesus, and, forgive me but what are the various stories of Jesus other than total ridiculous bullshit- reincarnation, "immaculate conception", all the other nonsense- intended to build and maintain the social and financial control structures that existed at the time?
I have not studied concrete instances of bullshit in the middle ages but the post-Enlightenment (a bullshit term if ever there was one) was riddled with bullshit. And then the late 1800s in the US featured "snake oil salesman" and "wildcat banking"- these sales pitches are literally indistinguishable from those described in the article.
Technology changes the diffusion rate and potentially the effectiveness of the art of the bullshitter (debatable) but the art itself is ancient.
The truth-tellers were expected to have an advantage: once the truth was seen, most people would recognize and accept it. The bullshitter's advantage was the slow speed of information diffusion.
Turns out that is wrong. People are regularly given definitive rejections of bullshit, and they deny them. It's not that they haven't seen it, but that they choose to accept the bullshitter's reality. We always expected to be able to fool some of the people all of the time... but we assumed that "some" was a number in the single-digit percentages, not a majority or near majority of the (connected, first) world.
I still don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty glum, to be honest. And I believe that's a lot of the point. I think that a lot of people choose to accept bullshit precisely because they think it hurts people they don't like. They may even grasp that it's false, but simply don't care. The negative consequences to them are sufficiently far off as to be dismissed, but the upside of having people angry at them is immediate.
There is a word for this type of lie: vranyo.
Lying about believing that Trump will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it distracts you from addressing their actual motivations which they know are cruel and unjust.
I come from a very, very red part of America, and I can assure you that many of them do believe it, or at least did in early 2021. A couple years later, we've seen the investigations turn up none of the evidence that was described, but people still believe it. Close relatives of mine were raving about the 2000 mules documentary earlier in the year, which was completely debunked.
I think a lot of those same people are getting tired of being told that the next big shoe to drop is just around the corner, but if we're being honest, it's not all that different from how the left treated the Mueller investigation. Everyone was so convinced that they were going to rattle Trump's presidency and Mueller totally punted on Trump in his final report.
It feels like we're living in a non-stop JJ Abrams movie where we're constantly being triggered to follow one anxiety-inducing story after another.
But this is an example of the already noted risk to have "overly quick" "bullshit identifiers" around, which may add further noise instead of progression.
Stories of deep psychological truth that transcend physical space and time. Just like all great religious stories.
Two notes:
-- it is argued that "bullshitting is not lying, as the true/false state remains unknown to the actor because considered irrelevant": well, no, it is still substantially lying, as a disregard for truth. And I am not even checking philology, as I would normally do before discussing meanings: this is not a matter about the meaning of 'true' or 'lie', but substantial ethics.
-- it is noted that we do not have enough "bullshit checkers". Now that is not the node: the node remains culture, intelligence, education, for many reasons; one of them is that "truth content" is not trivial and cannot be checked by anyone and cheaply and decisively. Boosting the fundamentals limits the undesirable phenomenon and more; just fighting the undesirable phenomenon will not guarantee "a step forwards" and will not be "a step above".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
It's only in some formal writing that you go out of your way to check everything.
...With that one is brought back to philology: that would be "normal" "descriptively, or according to frequency", but not "prescriptively, or according to norm" :)
> If you're going to call that lying
Not just me, I grant you, but a long tradition. Yes, not holding truth as a "ground condition" is regarded as lying (i.e. further distinctions have little matter).
> rumor, gossip, and speculation
Not in context. Reporting rumors, in the form of "Some say X" or "Some say X under conditions C", is a normal statement with T/F values. A "gossipper" ("godsibling", "acquired relative") reports rumors about an "inner circle" and falls in the other case. Speculation works through hypoteticals, which in the form "There are grounds to state that if A then probably B" is again a normal statement with T/F (and TF/~T~F) values.
Similarly, statements of the form “if X were true then Y would be true” are independent of the actual truth value of X, which is often unknown. If you care whether X is true or not, it’s entirely unhelpful. It’s indifferent to the truth of X because it’s an independent statement.
These can be seen as forms of bullshitting that avoids being technically incorrect.
It’s sort of like we’re doing now. We’re not discussing the ground truth of anything concrete.
The dimensions can be relatively independent - so you could plot the instances on a Cartesian graph, one axis describing the "adherence to Truth", the other other practical intents.
You may be comforting, you may be selling, etc.: you can do all of that without lying.
Here we are discussing: it is not impossible that somebody came just to pass the time (purpose), with utter disregard to any truth, and that may facilitate drifting towards bullshitting - but it a more fitting idea to regard exchangers as investigators over some matter, which is still an aletic activity, and the opposite of BSing.
Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" was a 1985 essay that got turned into a 2005 best selling book. Which itself restates a thesis by Mark Twain's 1880 "On the Decay of the Art of Lying."
1. The liar: The insidious lie fulfills this criterion, because the liar wants to deceive and is sure of success. 2. The bullshitter: thinks "What I'm saying could be wrong? So what?" 3. The idiot: thinks, however, "What I say could also be wrong? It'll be true!" The idiot just talks like that, or he heard something and passed it on unchecked.
In digital media, bullshitters and idiots - as opposed to liars - are both perpetrators and victims.
All three (liars, bullshitters, idiots) sometimes accidentally tell the truth. But because it is always easier to miss the truth than to meet it, in most cases they increase bullshit of all kinds and thus act at the expense of the truth.
Bullshit only spreads on the internet if many people forward it. If we were all attentive, critical and informed, then this phenomenon would not exist.
source(book): [ Philipp Hübl ] "Bullshit-Resistenz", 2018
If you grew up when I did, with one middle-of-the-road newspaper in a medium-size city delivered each day and read through; plus highly regulated/filtered TV news (and other content) then right now seems like an age of bullshit. Go back to the age of radio madness (Father Coughlin and many, many more like him) and the yellow press and you realize this isn't peak manure (although yes there's more of everything, meaning more good and bad information.)
But the well-moderated times have a price too: lots of stories that didn't fit the official narrative went unreported including the nature of native residential schools, nuclear mishaps, and much more.
For example, r/askscience offers a solution through moderation. Have a panel of known experts who review, comment and possibly even veto all topics of the day. Journalists rarely are experts, so pair them with consultants who have been vetted by the company. Today, the counterpoints to bullshit are at best buried inside the article in the form of a quote, and that's not strong enough to offset a false headline.
Or perhaps the author is one such bullshiter himself making a point with clickbait bullshit.
I would go with species bias. Strongmen and bullshitters have risen up in every age and caused general issues with humanity when it turns out that 'making shit up' only goes so far before cold hand of reality slaps you down. It doesn't help that while physical laws are stable and universal, they are built on models of randomness and probabilities that don't give humans the comfort of 'a sure thing'.
> Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
They aren't. Nathan J. Robinson (author of this article) is. Here's the full quote from the Obama speech.
> I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations, but I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
You can read this charitably (a passionate person who's excited about the collective project being embarked upon) or uncharitably (not very humble to connect your own presidency to the salvation of humanity). But it's total bullshit to read that as:
> a man who manipulated people’s emotions with stirring messianic rhetoric about how his election would mean the oceans would stop rising and change would come to the land, then delivered eight years of milquetoast centrism
If this is manipulating people, then literally every politician (not to mention every football coach) to ever have existed has manipulated people, and the core argument of the article shrinks to nothingness.
Also, it's a plain lie. Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.
Funnily enough, if anything this irony bolsters the author's point that bullshit can be found anywhere. Even articles about bullshitters are themselves full of bullshit.
This article is almost The Onion worthy.
That really soured me on the author’s credibility — there’s no mention of opposition, and no matter what party you’re in you should agree that 6 of the 8 years he was in office were intensely adversarial.
For a minute I wondered if the piece was about to become self-referential; gradually slipping into complete bullshit in order to illustrate how it’s done. (Much like the film “Adaptation” changed toward the end as the protagonist changed his writing.)
Alas, it was just sloppy thinking and poor writing.
I agree that the most extreme cases of post-truth celebrity liars, while perhaps not a new phenomenon, may be parts, symptoms, or mechanisms of some new phenomenon that really deserves to be thoughtfully explored. But this article ain't that.
The Trump and Musk cases are fairly obvious, IMO. Even many of their proponents would agree both have a propensity for "bullshit" at times.
Obama is already a bit more murky: I certainly share the author's disappointment in how the Obama presidency turned out, but it's not clear to me if he really was "bullshitting" or if he started out with genuine intentions and just overestimated the difficulties he would run in to – even if we assume Obama was bulshitting to some degree, the political difficulties he faced are no doubt a huge factor (I used to joke that the GOP could be replaced by an extremely advanced AI which consists of "if proposed_by('obama') then oppose() endif").
I haven't followed Pinker's more recent work very closely (I read two of his older books from the early 2000s), but the article that's linked to prove the point (by the same author) does not make a convincing case. Maybe he can come off as a bit arrogant at times, which is a fair enough criticism, but that does not make one a "bullshitter". He cites “Many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one.” as the first example of "utterly irrational swipes at those to the left of him"? Seriously? My feelings about some of the other citation are a bit more mixed, but none of them seem "bullshitting" to me: just a guy voicing his opinion that you may or may not agree with in a way that you may or may not like.
In short, this is the umpteenth attempt to make "I don't like it" somehow sound more authoritative. Which sounds like ... ehm, bulshitting to me.
The intellectual dishonesty is high on this one.
And then:
> But it turned out that Bankman-Fried had essentially gambled away customers’ deposits at his company, leaving the customers in the lurch and destroying Bankman-Fried’s fortune virtually overnight.
That is not at all what the indictment is about. It would be nice if the media stopped trying to bullshit us into believing that.
Alameda was a scam from way before FTX was even created. The leaflet selling Alameda to investors were already using fake return figures.
There are counts of conspiracy to defrauds customers and investors alike.
The "effective altruism" guru (the Oxford professor who bought a $15m mansion with stolen money) was actually involved at FTX.
It's not clear at all he's clean.
Real altruistic people don't need to posture as altruistic people. They don't need to run cults. They don't need to scam people. They don't need to pose as "holier than thou" people.
And they certainly don't buy $15m mansions with stolen money.
What about, instead of spitting on Elon Musk, we get some actual investigative journalism?
For example I've got an interesting subject to investigate: the exact role of SBF's guru who frequented the Bahamas and is running an "Effective Altruism" movement from a $15m mansion bought with stolen money?
And, please, journalists... No bullshit in this age.