Desperately need this in academia. The academic literature is full of hyped-up phrasing. Probably safe to say the more hyped-up something is presented, the less novel it actually is.
I used to think I wasn't smart enough to read academic articles. Then I realized that most of the authors are just terrible writers or deliberately make their papers as difficult to read as possible to obscure or exaggerate their findings.
It's often said that if the writing is dense, the writer probably doesn't understand what they are saying. Being in academia for 20 years now this seems spot-on.
This always irks me, not just with academic articles but also with other "high-brow"/"intellectual" writing (including everything from literature and philosophy to tech writing). There's a lot of intentional or accidental obfucasting or complicating of things that when you call them out will just get you accused of being too stupid to understand it.
Its better today than it used to be. Go read some renaissance alchemical or natural philosophy texts. These are often called occult. The word "occult" means "hidden" as in "concealed behind a wall of unbelievably long winded flowery bullshit."
Today's academic writing is a paragon of brevity and clarity.
I've known a couple academics who argued to me that this problem is systemic, rather than something that can be blamed on indiviual authors. A friend of a friend submitted a biology paper that she tried to make as jargon-free as possible, and it was rejected on the grounds that she hadn't shown a familiarity with the field. She edited it to include the dense jargon she had originally avoided, and the article was accepted (though I'm not sure if the acceptance was from the original journal or a different one).
It definitely seems systemic. Scientific papers have a pretty distinct style. "Familiarity with the field" is something rather hard to check when reviewing the paper, but one of the easiest proxy for it is whether your paper sounds like every other paper. The expected side effect of immersing yourself in a field is that you pick up its style.
A huge amount of them can be summarized as "if your X fits these highly unlikely criteria, a highly specialized Y can give you 1% better results than a long-standing general algorithm that already works and you can probably use within 5 minutes".
Also, in physics at least, it seems like at some point in the 80s, the writing in academic papers became much worse than before.
When I had to (had the pleasure to) read some older papers, it was like they were from a different genre. They were clear and pleasant to read. Maybe it was before academics were measured by "hard numbers" (the academic version of PageRank - resulting in link farms) that some lazy fools made up.
I haven't noticed that with computer vision papers, maybe it depends on the field? There is sometimes difficult to understand jargon but it's generally not gratuitous.
My former field, in the humanities, prizes clear, direct writing and doesn't suffer bullshit or needless density. It's one of my favorite aspects of the discipline and its culture.
>Would be cool if it suggested alternatives like Grammarly does.
sounds kind of counter-productive. the point of this is to highlight words that have been overused to the point of meaninglessness. If you're trying to use it to improve your own writing, each red "bullshit" is an opportunity to stop and think about what you really mean, not an opportunity to use a different fancy-sounding word that's been suggested by some automated tool.
Bullshit.js is a bullshit, bullshit bullshit JavaScript bookmarklet that will bullshit you to evaluate the bullshit of bullshit text on any Web resource, cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking.
I love the expression, "cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking". Ironically, it really cuts through the bullshit of "cultivating process-centric innovation and out-of-the-box thinking".
Brings to mind the good old Dada Engine, which was a great practical introduction to Markov chains:
It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.
Yeah. Bullshit is the Chaotic Evil of epistemology.
(Key quote from the linked Wiki summary: "Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.")
It would actually be a great feature to also convert the word "bullshit" into a random keyword from the dictionary. This way you can run it twice and then generate brand new summary of the service.
The cool thing with this would be that after n iterations, where n % 2 == 0, you'd still get the same bullahit as output. Send this along with a hash/number indicating the position of each converted word in the dictionary, and you have a simple cipher thing.
That caused me problems when I edited a wiki page that was subscribed to by about 200 colleagues at Amazon. I changed around 20 mentions of the word cloud on the page to the word butt and hit save without realising.
Edit: for those of you who read French, I recommend the "Disruptive Humans of LinkedIn" Twitter account [1], where OP's bullshit detector would shine like a beacon.
This made my day.
On my startup ideas TODO list there is one PredictiveBullshitMeter that one day will warn you before clicking on a link if the target is full of bullshit. My motivation was terrible news article that appear regularly on Indian newspaper websites where they rehash the same pile of junk again and again to make it look like a full page length article/report.
I was hoping for a quick number like a ratio of facts vs garbage but even before clicking on a link. I wanted my computer to do the job of prefetching the content and parsing it for facts.
Anyways thanks for making this thing. Feels nice to know there are other people who suffer from the same pain :-) but thankfully are more proactive to do something about it.
> Design-ready bullshits are based on the bullshit (Bullshit)-bullshitted, bullshit-ready Fusion Design Bullshit™ from Synopsys, along with Arm Artisan® Physical IP and POP™ IP for Samsung Foundry's advanced 5LPE process.
LMAO on this one. A worthy successor to "kurwoskrypt" which inserted "kurwa" in random places. ;)
This is amazing. My training is in languages, and I would love to contribute to this. Holy shit, they even have "going forward." I love, love, love this.
"Bullshit CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bullshit designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."
131 comments
[ 542 ms ] story [ 3509 ms ] threadBulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures by John R. Ellis http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf
Today's academic writing is a paragon of brevity and clarity.
No. Really? shutupandtakemymoney.gif
When I had to (had the pleasure to) read some older papers, it was like they were from a different genre. They were clear and pleasant to read. Maybe it was before academics were measured by "hard numbers" (the academic version of PageRank - resulting in link farms) that some lazy fools made up.
I seriously want to use this on my own content, as someone when lazy I resort to buzz words.
IIRC bookmarklets are terribly insecure (I'd have to carefully examine the source code, for example, before running this on my gmail.com).
Or just highlight the words and calculate a bullshit ratio or something.
sounds kind of counter-productive. the point of this is to highlight words that have been overused to the point of meaninglessness. If you're trying to use it to improve your own writing, each red "bullshit" is an opportunity to stop and think about what you really mean, not an opportunity to use a different fancy-sounding word that's been suggested by some automated tool.
Bullshit.js is a bullshit, bullshit bullshit JavaScript bookmarklet that will bullshit you to evaluate the bullshit of bullshit text on any Web resource, cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking.
I love the expression, "cultivating bullshit bullshit and bullshit thinking". Ironically, it really cuts through the bullshit of "cultivating process-centric innovation and out-of-the-box thinking".
Brings to mind the good old Dada Engine, which was a great practical introduction to Markov chains:
http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.
(Key quote from the linked Wiki summary: "Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.")
Frank was right on the mark 30 years ago!
If you're looking for that other site, stuff redirects there other than this page
(Cloud is striked through)
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology
https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accentures-future-system...
Edit: for those of you who read French, I recommend the "Disruptive Humans of LinkedIn" Twitter account [1], where OP's bullshit detector would shine like a beacon.
[1] https://twitter.com/DisruptiveHoLin
I can't believe uptime isn't in there.
https://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
LMAO on this one. A worthy successor to "kurwoskrypt" which inserted "kurwa" in random places. ;)
"Bullshit CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bullshit designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override."