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posted by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the We-could-keep-this-up-forever dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:19AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:19AM (#709749)

    From the Fine Article:

    It is now very common for proponents of alternative medicine to emphasise ‘open-mindedness’. Unfortunately, this can entail disregarding empirical evidence. For example, many anti-vaxxers do not appear to care that Andrew Wakefield’s infamous article in the Lancet in 1998 drawing a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has long been discredited and retracted. Indeed, straight-up explanations of this fact do little to dissuade those who have fallen prey to anti-vaxxer bullshit. Diseases such as measles and mumps are making a comeback in the US and, according to at least one website, there have been more than 9,000 preventable deaths due to failures to vaccinate in the US since 2007. Bullshit is indeed no laughing matter.

    We really need to listen to all perspectives, even the deplorable ones. Then more people can die.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @02:00PM (#709906)

    The trouble is that suppressing or censoring their "perspectives" only makes them froth at the mouth harder. It turns them into martyrs, and martyr bullshit is more influential than normal bullshit. So we must not pursue outright censorship.

    Anti-vax, flat Earth (assuming flat Earth isn't just elaborate trolling), and other things like it are symptoms. They are not the disease themselves.

    For vaccines specifically, what we should have is a narrow interpretation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Only an educated populace who is engaged in the political process can make this work. (So already my proposal is dead in the water.) We could simply require all children, excepting doctor's advice to the contrary, to be vaccinated. Don't attach it to crap like the public school system. Don't attach it to medicaid for all if we get that. Don't give a way out for these people. Just simply require it and fund it 100%.

    (The educated populace engaged in the political process part of my plan is what prevents it from descending into medical totalitarianism. Again, we see why my plan is fundamentally flawed.)

    As for what the disease is, I guess I have little to offer that isn't likely to be bullshit.