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Aeon has an interesting article on bullshit:
We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation. Indeed, you have likely come across more bullshit so far this week than a normal person living 1,000 years ago would in their entire lifetime. If we were to add up every word in every scholarly piece of work published prior to the Enlightenment, this number would still pale in comparison with the number of words used to promulgate bullshit on the internet in the 21st century alone.
If you find your head nodding, start shaking it. I’m bullshitting you.
Ha! I knew it!
How could I possibly know how much bullshit you have come across this week? What if you’re reading this on a Sunday? Who is a ‘normal’ person living 1,000 years ago? And how could I know how much bullshit they had to deal with?
It was very easy to construct this bullshit. Once I set out to impress rather than inform, a burden was lifted from my shoulders and placed onto yours. My opening statements could very well be true, but we have no way of knowing. Their truth or falsity were irrelevant to me, the bullshitter.
[...] In his book, On Bullshit (2005), Frankfurt noted that ‘most people are rather confident of their ability to recognise bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it’. However, more than 98 per cent of our participants rated at least one item in our bullshit receptivity scales to be at least somewhat profound. We are not nearly as good at detecting bullshit as we think.
So, how might you – the reader – vaccinate yourself against it? For a non-spiritualist, it might be relatively easy to recognise when Chopra or Oz are concerned less with the truth than selling books or entertaining viewers. But think back to my opening paragraph. Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:56PM (15 children)
Turn this site off then. The BS level is *very* high here.
(Score: 4, Funny) by isostatic on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:09PM (4 children)
It's all relative. I only trust MichaelDavidCrawford.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:29PM (3 children)
And jmorris is the avatar of the god of Objective Truth.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday July 20 2018, @02:02AM (2 children)
Well that should be everyone's goal, right? None can actually hit that goal, but the harder we strive for it the better. Figure out what the facts are and be unafraid to speak them. The rustled jimmies, outraged shrieks and "I just can't even" reactions are most useful; they are bright spotlights on people who are useless in debating that particular issue, showing who should be totally ignored (or trolled for lulz). Those who can face the facts (or even dispute them intelligently), debate the proper weight to assign to them, the logical consequences, etc. are where the actual debate is. "I'm offended" is not an argument.
Screw your feelings. What are the facts, to how many decimal places have they been measured and where are the error bars and footnotes. Then lets see the methodology.
2 + 2 = 4 for all values of 2 and 4*, for all identity groups and regardless of the level of privilege of the person working the problem.
* Assuming base 10 or any base greater than 4 and the custom is to assume numbers are base 10 unless explicitly noted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:09AM
Epic fail. jmorris wants his own integers! What bullshit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @03:05AM
You calling for facts is making my brain kick my eyeballs from behind trying to get the eyelids to shut.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:21PM (8 children)
Bullshit! How would you know?
Why does a BS source need to be turned off?
Or what you propose is only specific to this site?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @12:02AM (7 children)
(Different AC here, no BS). I agree, a well trained or perhaps a well fed bullshit detector is a shield against the malicious (and may yet protect the American democracy even, we'll see). In that sense a set of low quality (i.e. easily discernible) bullshit sources make for a great training ground. I *love* my bullshit detector, it has given me the heads-up in more perilous situations than I care to remember.
For the uninitiated I will offer one beginner's tip, in the same vein as the TFS. In the information ago, plainly stated facts that are researchable, such as TFS' statement around the Enlightenment, are a quick checkpoint in a steady flow of non information - such as the rest of TFS. Amongst a bizarre set of circumstances and politics I was coerced into an NLP course (thats the piffle-founded "neuro linguistic programming" kind, not the computational discipline named "natural language processing" kind). I had never heard of it before, so no preconception or domain specific intuition to work with. In that audio book courseware was endless untestable emotion-lead drivel that was setting my bullshit detector off like I was being sold the worlds most used car, so I did a quick check on a handful of "facts" that were used to anchor the raving to "truth", to validate my suspicion. One statement asserted was something like .. " the brain is like my other muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets which is why Einstein's brain was so much heavier than everyone elses " .. hmm, how come I've never heard that before? 'cause it turned out IIRC (check my facts!) Einstein's brain had been measured three times after his death and found to be very fkn average in its physical proportions each time!
Bullshit is dead. Long live Bullshit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @01:40AM (6 children)
orig ac here... The point was BS is impossible to detect. Except when you decide it is. I was just being a goof....
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 20 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)
You and I must have two different definition for bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @09:56PM
I seriously doubt that. But I would bet cash you have bias's that make things 'slip by' and you would never know. Once you accept the fact that your brain lies to you to make you feel better about yourself and what happens to you the better off you can be about what others do. The difference between being malicious and incompetent can in many cases be impossible to tell.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 20 2018, @05:15AM (3 children)
Ok, why do you think that? Phrases like "smells like bullshit" didn't come about because people thought bullshit was undetectable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @09:52PM (2 children)
The point was BS is impossible to detect. Except when you decide it is.
Ok, why do you think that? Phrases like "smells like bullshit" didn't come about because people thought bullshit was undetectable.
You are making my exact point. You are also re-writing what I said by a lie of omission. Creating the air that you can detect BS. BS is impossible to detect correctly. Your cognitive biases will guide you. Especially if the statements play to your bias or directly oppose them.
Still do not think so?
Try this on for size. That happened to me just yesterday.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you by the court. With these rights in mind, are you still willing to talk with me about the charges against you?
Now having read that would you not assume that lawyer is free? Someone I know is going through the system right now. He said 'I do not want to use that lawyer they cost 150 bucks'. I thought he was 'full of shit', until yesterday. Then I went and read the law. He was right. In some states/counties/cities they charge you for the use of that court appointed lawyer. In my state if you get a not guilty the lawyer cost is on the state. If found guilty they can charge anywhere from 50-70 an hour. My weird point? BS is hard to actually detect but you think you are an expert at it, your brain told you so. My bias of watching too much TV had muddled what is real or fake. You can argue if what happens is right or wrong. But the fact remains that lawyer is not free to all defendants in all cases, just available. BS is all over the place. Set your sensors too high and you will be the one full of it.
You do not even have to take my word for it. It is in the summary.
Frankfurt noted that ‘most people are rather confident of their ability to recognise bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it’. However, more than 98 per cent of our participants rated at least one item in our bullshit receptivity scales to be at least somewhat profound. We are not nearly as good at detecting bullshit as we think
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 20 2018, @11:22PM
Hard to detect doesn't mean impossible to detect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:44AM
That is incorrect. It's not the words that make that bullshit, but the context. And how much is the lawyer going to collect from a poor person in jail? It's not going to be $50-70 per hour.
But now that we know both the words and the relevant context, welp, it's bullshit. Next.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 20 2018, @02:18PM
Oh, just use the filters I use. If you see a post written in a weird font, skip. If you see anything longer than a paragraph, and a child is mentioned in it, skip. Anything written in gibberish, skip.
There are a handful of others I file under 'skim,' but I don't want them to feel bad because sometimes they do try.
Washington DC delenda est.