Bullshit
stoa.org.uk
stoa.org.uk
I think one needs to be very careful about this business of "cutting through the bullshit" or whatever. It's easy to turn it into a self-righteous way of talking about whatever you disagree with. You're not just disagreeing, you're scoring a victory for the truth in a world full of crap, etc., etc. Also, it does nothing to analyze why certain social fictions are propagated and continue to function even if no one believes in them. You can just content yourself with thinking everyone is full of shit and stop thinking there.
Was this a political thing for them, that they don't support these behaviors politically and so concluded after "examining" the resulting effects that behaving in this way (controlling guns or recycling) don't have the claimed effects?
I mean, shit, they called the episode "environmental hysteria" and they pulled the old "dihydrogen monoxide" thing. In so many words: We found some dumb people that care about the environment, therefore if you care about the environment you're dumb.
If I remember rightly they did something on environmentalism where they mostly interviewed unwashed hippies rather than environmental scientists.
I'm of the opinion that most strong advocates of recycling also aren't aware of these numbers, and more importantly, don't care, but maybe I'm wrong on that (but I doubt it from most of the conversations I've had).
Educational and stimulative efforts (through fines or rewards) have been successful in the sense that most people generally agree that being less wasteful and trying to recycle is a good idea, and know/feel that they could do more. This culture seeps into meetings, boardrooms, and annual reports, as well as laws, courts, and policing.
Yes, it's a disgusting job. But I imagine for the growing unemployed population back home in Europe that's still better than starvation.
Furthermore, I really really don't have room for three to four different garbage cans in my tiny apartment.
Gun Control - I don't remember the arguments there, other than specifically arguing against most popular arguments against the second amendment.
That said, their approach to these topics tends to be one of the more tolerable I've seen, as they actually have a sense of humour, unlike most ideologues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx9jKv6pgP8
(nsfw)
Trust and authority are currently centralised and because this is the case if you want to belong to society you will have to become more forgiving of bullshit.
Additionally I haven't met a single person yet (and I include myself in this wonderful category) that doesn't believe their own bullshit.
Whenever I hear somebody imply that they're always correct and never believe or act upon anything that can be empirically disproven I call bullshit at that or wonder whether they've ever risked believing and acting upon anything at all?
If you truly despise bullshit then do this: before you point the finger at others realise that you're likely one of them, and that if you really want to lessen it your best chance will be to start with yourself. This is called humility.
How might you do this? Well perhaps before or after you say something, you can turn to others and ask them what they truly think without imposing expectations or qualifications that they must agree with you. And remember even if they respond saying "yes, that sounds right" you could still be wrong and trust me here you will eventually be wrong. You are only human.
If the cognitive dissonance of knowing that you will never be a perfectly rational being is too much for you, then continue believing whatever you want about your intellect and others quackery as the world will not stop you.
I guess we all need our egos [1].
* * *
[1] Our need to politicise and attack the bullshit of somebody with higher status shows our wish to have the injustice of not being the dominant re-evaluated by our group, while our need to attack the bullshit of those with lower status is a strategy to fight off perceived pretenders of our position. Resentment and contempt are after all two sides of the same coin, both used when we don't want to personally act on our feelings.
Is the author trying to imply that irony, sarcasm, and satire are bullshit?
I'd be very careful with definitions here. Because many human endeavors can be observed and described from many different angles, the wisest course of action many times may be to emotionally disengage and describe one or many of the sides without caring about a discussion of universal truth. This does not make one a bullshitter, although by this definition it does.
I couldn't recall the norms here. I figured a mod could always un-G-rate the title (as they did).
Plus, I felt a little uncomfortable because the title "Bullshit" could seem link-baity (although the content is worthwhile) so I felt better submitting it "toned down".
Those are my stated reasons. Of course you may call bullshit.
Anyone who knows what the word means and is shocked by it will surely still be shocked even with the * in. I've never understood what partial censoring, intentionally done so that people can still read the thing, achieves.
EDIT -> Ah, the title has been edited now, it did say "bullsh*t". It's probably a good example of how to derail a potential useful submission by focusing on the wrong details when creating a title.
Not religion? Aww...
I'd rather strongly disagree with that. Because it appeals to a form of justification which makes verifiability in any decisive sense largely impossible, it is a fertile venue for "bullshit" (in the terms used in the article) -- and for the same reason, for "liars", which the article distinguishes -- but it is not, either in principle or in practice, either exclusively bullshit nor "for bullshits sake". The purposes of bullshitting, lying, or truth-telling in religion are pretty much the same as they are in any other venue.
Both truth telling and lying (both of which the article distinguishes from BS), as defined in the article, are quite possible in domains where the questions aren't subject to scientific exploration. Whether those domains are meaningful is a philosophical question orthogonal to the truth/lie/BS distinction that the article makes, though.
> The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are.
Especially that last sentence is relevant. I may personally consider most of religion to be nonsense or untrue, but its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). Bullshit - again, as defined by the article - goes beyond that. It doesn't have to be true or false. It's just.. bullshit. The infamous "leverage synergy" phrase comes to mind. It doesn't even mean anything.
The same could be said of other areas mentioned in the list in the post you were responding to. The point appears to be not that the entire field is bullshit, but that one can find examples of bullshit in the field. I would even add science to the list if that's the criterion; one can find examples of bullshit in science as well.
If, OTOH, the point was to give fields that appear to be primarily bullshit, I would not have put education, love, sex and romance, technology, business, art, and medicine on the list. (Or science.)
the real bullshit comes in with people like you who pretend your preaching the truth but you really know nothing about it. your just a bullshitter.
see, if you truly believed in science, which could be coined as the pursuit of truth, you'd simply stick to saying some elements of a religion are true, some are false, and some if not many cannot be known/discovered.
you'd probably sit there and complain if someone said something that blanketed an entire topic, while you do the same to religion. and i would guess you'd probably call yourself scientific. again, i think this is the epitome of bullshit.
He/she didn't really make any statements of what truth is. Only what his/her opinion of a missing element of the article was.
He/she did set off a heap of reactions though, which is interesting to me. I've noticed how much more religion-friendly, or at least religion-neutral HN has become over the past year. That is a positive thing, in my opinion.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
Thanks for proving that mindless unkind criticisms of misunderstood communities is alive and well at HN as well.