You've linked to the main page, which at this moment in time happens to have the bullshit blog post at the top. It's better to link to the actual blog post: https://stactivist.com/2016/05/29/bullshit-fighting/
Agreed, I'm quite sensitive to the scrollbar size when I land on a new article, and in this case I almost closed the window, thinking this would take the whole day to read :)
Hard to tell whether this is serious or not. What field is this describing? Scientific papers? Random idiots just posting on websites? If the idea is to challenge it everywhere you're setting yourself up to being that person who never sleeps because "someone is wrong on the internet".
So...peer review, then? I suppose you could rebut comments from muppets if you were feeling a little bored but it's unclear what that would hope to achieve. Could you imagine stopping the industry which talks rubbish about the lunar landings and 9/11 with well written, carefully reasoned replies?
Don't wrestle with pigs; you both get muddy, and the pigs like it.
The problem with science is that it's findings get exaggerated by the media and by politicians. People latch onto one positive result, and ignore all the negative results. The media reports on findings that haven't been replicated yet, and significantly distort and exaggerate them.
Even within science, there are problems like publication bias and political bias.
If you read the article, you discovered that it was talking about politicians, marketers, scientific fact deniers, scientists, researchers and generally regardless of a person's "roles in society".
Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit is a relatively respected philosophical treatise of rather recent origin. Whether or not it approaches science depends on how one views the origins of scientific method in philosophical treatises of post-aristotealian early modernity: e.g. Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Bacon, etc [or whether Aristotle hisself was being scientific].
Definitely. It takes hours to properly argue. It takes minutes to bullshit.
How many times do you give up on a social media argument just because you don't want to spend the next 30-60 minutes researching and building a solid case for your argument? I've given up completely. The bullshitters win.
And I think the more troubling problem is that bullshitters are generally indifferent to or hostile to the truth, to the very inclination to seek truth. The primary lens through which they evaluate statements is "personally useful to me", not "true".
So even if I carefully build a case for "true", it won't make much of a difference. At best, they decide their next personally useful statement is a non sequitur or a topic change or just going to some other context that is useful.
To me that's one of the really amazing things about Trump's rise. He really doesn't care about facts or logic or consistency. Even among politicians, he's a standout; none of his Republican opponents could come to grips with how totally irrelevant accuracy or orthodoxy are to his game. People keep trying to figure out what his true views are, but at this point I don't think that's a meaningful question.
And I should add that this isn't a left vs right issue; a recent example of a left-wing demagogue was Venezuela's Chavez. But Trump's rise is the first time I've gotten to see it happen up close.
I honestly thought this was about Trump for the first few paragraphs, and almost quit reading.
While we've found the the scientific meathod doesn't scale, I suspect that a Watson style application could seriously help one day. This is only compounded this with the "publish or perish" mentality. This encourages falsifying results, but also adds more noise to the pool of journals, decreasing your chance of being called out. I don't think the issue is with liars, but with the system.
What we really need now is Scienceology, (no not the religion) but a division of science that analyzes science. Finding better ways than what we have now.
edit: Cleaned up to make it slightly less nonsensical. I really shouldn't make a comment before having a coffee.
> One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis.
I tend to agree with the intention but I think this subject is way more complex than this.
People form visions of the world based on their beliefs systems and they pull/push that vision in their behavior and the things they build.
To show what I mean about this: in a way, many good entrepreneurs are reality deniers. They need to refuse to believe that the current status quo is the best that the world can be. They need to believe a reality that does not exist (yet) in order to build it. For people with affinity they will be visionaries, for people that antagonise with them they will be bullshitters.
But that's how disruption happens, with cultural and market irreverence. That is pitched "selling smoke" (in the eyes of the cynic) or selling a new way to experience X in life (in the eyes of its believers and users/clients)
It may be useful to distinguish between things that are not true and never will be, and things that are not true but could eventually be true. If one were to try to present the former as though it were true, what they'd be presenting is bullshit, whereas I would say that the latter is merely (note the air quotes) "bullshit." To those who need everything to be true now, the latter will be seen as bullshit, but it is not actual bullshit, as it may yet become true.
> If something is not true, who cares? All the same. These attributes make bullshitting worse than lying.
It makes bullshitting clearly BETTER. Being overly defensive about it, misses the point. BS is hard to combat, which is why it's a successful approach (not even a learned strategy because then it would be lying).
Is the bullshit built into the company's DNA? Some places I have worked have certain varieties of bullshit that have basically become company truths. If this is the case, then you really aren't going to fight it.
I'm very sure he doesn't care one way or the other. He speaks with confidence then reframes conversations as necessary. This passes for leadership in modern society. Have you ever tried to listen to a US senator or a UK Lord or a Japanese Diet member argue?
The greatest danger posed by bullshit is that powerful persons start believing their own. The neutral ends justify the means form is relatively benign.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadMost likely yes. The author works in a scientific institute and has number of publications.
Don't wrestle with pigs; you both get muddy, and the pigs like it.
I'm guessing it applies to the way research money is attributed. Whoever follows the most recent hype gets all the funding.
Yeah, because it has proven so effective thus far /s
Even within science, there are problems like publication bias and political bias.
As with much in philosophy, it often boils down to deciding for onesself rather than appealing to autority. http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf
How many times do you give up on a social media argument just because you don't want to spend the next 30-60 minutes researching and building a solid case for your argument? I've given up completely. The bullshitters win.
So even if I carefully build a case for "true", it won't make much of a difference. At best, they decide their next personally useful statement is a non sequitur or a topic change or just going to some other context that is useful.
To me that's one of the really amazing things about Trump's rise. He really doesn't care about facts or logic or consistency. Even among politicians, he's a standout; none of his Republican opponents could come to grips with how totally irrelevant accuracy or orthodoxy are to his game. People keep trying to figure out what his true views are, but at this point I don't think that's a meaningful question.
And I should add that this isn't a left vs right issue; a recent example of a left-wing demagogue was Venezuela's Chavez. But Trump's rise is the first time I've gotten to see it happen up close.
And it is quite disappointing because most people only have a few moments of attention span.
It is an amount of magnitude more harmful to be labeled troll than imaginative.
Most BSer are hiding themselves behind smoke screen of so called innovation, saying the old ways have always tended to be wrong.
And the mass is BSing to. Pretending to know more than what it actually knows.
Bullshit is a global shared social attitude.
While we've found the the scientific meathod doesn't scale, I suspect that a Watson style application could seriously help one day. This is only compounded this with the "publish or perish" mentality. This encourages falsifying results, but also adds more noise to the pool of journals, decreasing your chance of being called out. I don't think the issue is with liars, but with the system.
What we really need now is Scienceology, (no not the religion) but a division of science that analyzes science. Finding better ways than what we have now.
edit: Cleaned up to make it slightly less nonsensical. I really shouldn't make a comment before having a coffee.
> One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis.
Information asymmetry. Bullshit is applied game theory.
People form visions of the world based on their beliefs systems and they pull/push that vision in their behavior and the things they build.
To show what I mean about this: in a way, many good entrepreneurs are reality deniers. They need to refuse to believe that the current status quo is the best that the world can be. They need to believe a reality that does not exist (yet) in order to build it. For people with affinity they will be visionaries, for people that antagonise with them they will be bullshitters.
But that's how disruption happens, with cultural and market irreverence. That is pitched "selling smoke" (in the eyes of the cynic) or selling a new way to experience X in life (in the eyes of its believers and users/clients)
It makes bullshitting clearly BETTER. Being overly defensive about it, misses the point. BS is hard to combat, which is why it's a successful approach (not even a learned strategy because then it would be lying).
EDIT: Let say it's not in the company DNA and that it's just some individuals behaviours.
I assume we aren't talking a technical argument. If we are, then do a presentation and it will all come out in the Q&A.