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Comment by Aoyagi | Hacker News Reader

>Advertising, Public relations, Political propaganda, Education, Love, sex and romance, News media, Technology, Business, Art, Medicine

Not religion? Aww...

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I don't consider what happens in religion bullshit as defined by the article. I think this sums it up pretty well:

> 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.

> its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief).

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.)

some people in religion are bullshitters, some are liars, and some are truth tellers.

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.

I'd say Aoyagi was really just expressing disdain for not including religion on the list. Saying he/she was 'preaching the truth' seems a bit far-fetched. He/she asked a question about something not being included: "not religion?", and expressed vague dislike (in an obviously subjective way): "awww"

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.

Of a particularly relevant note here is agnosticism [1], or the viewpoint that there are certain things that are simply unknowable to humans. The implication being that humans can neither confirm NOR deny the truth value of the statements. Metaphysical statements often fall into this category. And hence, you can also have agnostic theists [2] and agnostic atheists [3], who both recognize that they are taking a stance on an unknowable truth value. Some would then define this as the very essence of the word faith, but I would like to at least point out that both sides are subject to the same definition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism

Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. Is religion not the only place where bullshit is acceptable, nay .. even required .. and that people know that before they get involved in one?

Yeah, it's bullshit by design, so I guess there is not a lot to talk about. Oh well.

> Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake.

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.

I think the point is that once a religion stops being bullshit, it becomes a science.

That simply doesn't work with the definitions in the article. If you are using BS to mean anything that's not taking an exclusively empirical approach to explore exclusively questions of objective fact -- which its pretty clear that some people do -- then, sure, that's tautologically true. But that's a completely different definition than is used in the article, so its not relevant.

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.

Here we go. In the last year since moving here from Slashdot/Reddit, I've seen such a more sophisticated and thoughtful community.

Thanks for proving that mindless unkind criticisms of misunderstood communities is alive and well at HN as well.

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