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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: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 20 2018, @02:47PM (1 child)
That was beautifully put.
I remember back in the early days of the Internet I was contemplating what direction to take in my graduate studies, and the effect of the Internet on society was one I considered. I remember reading speculation from the handful of scholars who were thinking about the same thing at the time, wherein they argued that the ubiquity of information would overwhelm our ability to think critically and produce a world where everyone discounts fact and decides everything based on their gut. It seems they were right, at least in part.
Me, I believe the cause in the spike of bullshit you're talking about is generated by a huge set of facts, of reality, that is unbearable. Limbically, experientially, we have the fact that the social, political, and economic systems we've been using for the last 2, 300 years are broken. We all know it. But instead of resolving ourselves to the hard work of coming up with something new, we spew all kinds of bullshit and finger-pointing to avoid it.
Yes, we should practice critical thinking. It is intellectual armor against deception. But it's not enough to just do that, and nothing else. We also must call things what they are, by their painful, searing true names. Lastly, we need to pick up our tools and build a better vessel to carry us forward.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday July 20 2018, @04:53PM
Perhaps one of the best things we could do to fight bullshit is to cultivate a love of learning in our children - pretty much the exact opposite of the rote memorization and training our education system rewards. I know when I get into a discussion I will quite often spend a half-hour or more composing a post, simply because I'm looking up enough information to voice a strong position and flesh out the details - as much to myself as anyone else. The discussion is a good excuse to go learn some random stuff because it's fun to do. And I have quite often run into important details that have completely derailed my argument. Which can sometimes be quite unsettling if the argument is based on internalized "truths", but that has it's own thrill, like hiking through unfamiliar terrain and having the ground crumble beneath you: recovering your mental balance may be stressful, but that was a heck of a recovery, and now I understand the world a little bit better.
Perhaps the most important lesson to be internalized is that your understanding of the universe is always and inevitably wrong, in many ways large and small. And you'll never know which ideas are wrong until you confront evidence to the contrary, because until that moment, being wrong feels exactly like being right.