The bullshit didn't even have to be believable: "Marilyn Manson was the kid that played Paul from the Wonder Years. Also, he had a rib removed so he could perform autofellatio." Kids everywhere believed that. Hilarious.
Right, like "Vaccines cause autism" and "Homeopathy is something you should say without laughing". Also hilarious.
There's a dark side to bullshit. There's a side which creates endless pain for no good reason, because things 'sound good' or are 'too good to check' and nobody likes a party-pooper, do they? Especially when the party-pooper is pointing out how this little piece of bullshit could kill someone.
No. Go along to get along. Don't be so serious all the time. Don't imagine you know better. It's rude.
As stolio notes elsewhere in the thread, there is a blunt difference. On the one side there's bullshit that matters, and on the other side is "no seriously, they both have Tyler in their name!" It is absolutely necessary to be able to tell the difference, since it's a basic way to avoid being conversationally tone deaf.
Alternatively, I invoke Poe's Law in case I'm being That Guy. (Tone's hard on the Internet - it's much better to play in person!)
Yet "vaccines cause autism" has spread like a virus over the Internet. I had never heard about it before the recent (ten years) memification. It's not like the recipients google it and go "no it doesn't" because it you really do you might as well go mad about the insane "facts" put forth. Google and the web in general probably spread as much bullshit as it kills. It's complicated.
On those kind of issues, the google results are a bit muddled. You'll get the results saying "No, of course vaccines don't cause autism", alongside a bunch of BS articles saying "It totally does, because I had my kid vaccinated once, and he's autistic!". Unless you actually search through the sources and figure out which is more credible, it's hard to get a straight yes or no answer.
Its actually become a fun game around here. Someone makes an outrageous claim and it starts a race to be the first to call them on it. Phones get drawn like six-guns and its on! We call this little victory of fact finding the "fonesnope". (Or "getting fonesnoped" if you happen to be the claimant). Its a fun party game. Try it.
As a kid I remember family discussions surrounding the legitimacy of certain pieces of trivia, often reaching the point where people began trying to shout over each other. Eventually, my uncle would pick up the phone, dial a random number and say, "Hi there, you wouldn't happen to know who directed Casablanca would you?"
I have a rule I always follow, and have convinced many friends of too -- no Googling/Wikipedia-ing in social settings. If nobody knows something (trivia-like), it's almost always a lot more fun to continue not knowing.
Sure, look it up when you get home. But a little group self-discipline goes far in keeping the fine art of bullshitting alive.
(And it's not just the answer that kills the conversation, but also the fact that someone is right and someone is wrong, game over. Much better to keep the game going!)
At least with the people I know, most trivia is the sort of thing they already found on the internet. If you browse Reddit and none of your friends do, you're pretty much guaranteed to know some bizarre fact. Similarly with programs like QI, it's often quite easy to know where people get their facts from (the conversation usually ends with "You got that from QI didn't you?" "Yes. I did.")
On the other hand I find it incredibly difficult to shut up when someone says something wrong about computing (or usually about some current affairs topic in computing). Don't be that guy.
> On the other hand I find it incredibly difficult to shut up when someone says something wrong about computing (or usually about some current affairs topic in computing). Don't be that guy.
I look it as an opportunity to see how many people outside the computing field see it. It's sometimes horrifying, but on the other hand, my most common reaction is "that explains so much".
I disagree. The conversation is so much more interesting when there are more connections, more tangents to explore than one mind can contain. Facts build on facts, and you can chase down endless rabbit holes when you're not limited to what one wrinkly lump of cholesterol can scrape out of its interconnected canyons.
Except exploring those connections is something people do by quietly clicking links on their screen and reading out the facts presented to them. That is not conversation.
Conversation is sharing personal interpretations of the world. It should be ok to be wrong. You'll always gain far more insight in to people around you, build closer bonds with them, and have more fun if you're willing to let a few trivial mistakes slide.
From personal experience, many people will treat conversation as a business event where sharing of facts is paramount. Certainly around my parents and their family, the tendency to railroad towards references, prepared stories and newspaper citations is overwhelming. Original criticism and self-reflection is too confrontational or vulnerable for them. Pauses and silences are considered "awkward" and to be avoided. Decorum is of high importance. This creates a stifling, repetitive conversational flow as they get to ruminate out loud on the same thoughts over and over, without really exploring anything.
Gradually, I've recognized the artifice that goes into these constraints and their denial of the human condition - especially since I can observe them become increasingly unprepared to perform this task as they get older and so lean on me more and more to drive the topics, while getting agitated and defensive if I deviate from the chosen railroad.
Sure, because what fun are facts? What have facts ever done for us? Other than cured disease, ended hunger, doubled lifespan. But lately, I mean!
Why anyone would ever choose bullshit over facts is beyond me. Facts are interesting. Facts are fun. Bullshit is just the unrestrained spew of the ignorant ego. There's no point to it other than mate competition, and making what amount to factual claims that are known to be false so you can score is what created a vast amount of human misery for untold thousands of years, and continues to do so in the less enlightened parts of the world (philosophy departments, for example...)
I'd much rather find out the facts and discuss them--and there is always something for anyone who isn't completely brain-dead to discuss--than listen to some egotistical ignoramous spew nonsense, and then have to argue against them knowing that in the absence of facts the standard of proof is "what just makes sense", which only an idiot would take as an interesting guide to reality, because reality, in the absence of facts, does not make sense.
Quantum mechanics? Totally incoherent.
Evolution? Pull the other one.
The Earth moves in an elliptical path around the sun and the wandering stars are huge balls of gas and rock? Ridiculous!
In a world before we invented the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference--that is, science--people based their ideas on the "game" you are describing. If you're a member of SCA I guess it might be fun to continue it, but from an epistemologist's point of view it looks about as civilized as cat mauling as a means of social entertainment.
Such things are best left in the Middle Ages, where they belong.
All of this is well and good, but has very little to do with a bullshit session with one's friends where everybody involved is having fun with an argument about something that is ultimately meaningless.
@eropple - I agree and if it pleases the court I'd like to narrow down your statement to the idea that interacting with actual people should take precedence to interacting with your smartphone as that skill seems to be getting whittled away.
Sounds awful. For me social situations always tend to be boring or exhausting after a while and then my phone is my saviour until I feel like getting back into the action again. Without it I wouldn't even attend.
I'm rather shocked at the fairly visceral reactions a lot of people are having here. This is pretty classic conversational shenanigans. We had a blast with this in college; either you play along or counter with something equally preposterous or unprovable. Looking up the answer is cheating. It's like a game of verbal Calvin Ball or Mornington Crescent. As noted elsewhere in this thread (edit: at least one level up it seems (I got lost, apparently)), the goal is to specifically not make it win/lose, since that ends the game and is boring.
Or, if you know your friends well enough to guess what they're going to say, it's the art of picking the third or fourth dialog choice from the top, Monkey Island style. And if you're really friends, they'll do the same and it'll work.
And then there was the other side, where you tried to derive the answer. One of my favorites was attempting to determine if you could neglect the earth's core in modeling gravity; ferocious debate for an hour and a half by a dozen engineers. Best lunch ever.
Really, this is more about people being boring. Jumping immediately to the obvious instead of enjoying a meandering argumentative stroll. It's a way to play. Simple as that.
Otherwise you're just the adult saying, "that's not lava, that's carpet." Killjoy is the word, I think.
I think you nailed it with the shenanigans reference. So long as it doesn't cross the border into inappropriateness or blatant insults it's just lighthearted humor to break the ice or stimulate conversation. After all, if we wanted boring robots to talk to there's always SmarterChild.
I realize you may have omitted some nuance, but to me, "debating" whether you have to consider the entirety of a mass when modeling gravity sounds incredibly boring. If you use 9.8 m/s*s you are papering over all the nuance, and otherwise 2 masses and a distance is pretty obviously fundamental.
Oh, it was a meandering conversation. Really, it revolved around what the implications were if one neglected the core such that it was a valid premise. How would you torture a model of the earth to allow a person to compensate for not bothering to keep track of the core in a model? Gravity is the most obvious start, which you can get away with some perverse shell geometries (which has the added benefit of ruining the shape of the planet). And there's all manner of heat and magnetics (I think we largely assumed those were also neglectable, which in retrospect is poor planning due to solar wind).
It wandered like that. It was a direct result of our introduction to modeling in the early core engineering courses. Wherein we abuse the power of deciding what gets into the model. (It all started with one person noting that we frequently neglect gravity in electrical engineering.)
I wouldn't oppose this and I'd probably even further it with a put-away-the-phone rule to encourage social interaction. That and it certainly helps with women/girls to be able to bullshit effectively because even if they know you're lying it is quite disarming and even charming and intriguing to engage in such banter. Another thing that helps with women is not necessarily having an expensive car but a nice car.
"I always tell guys, put away your phone and work on your car. Nobody ever got laid in the back seat of an iPhone." - Billy Gardell
But sometimes Google can keep a non-bullshit, non-serious conversation going, say when two friends talk about a movie and it doesn't ring a bell, but then you google it and the first image suggestion reminds you that you've seen it too, and it was THAT movie! Back into conversation...
Or when something is on the tip of your tongue for an hour.
Just back from a family meeting. When someone didn't know some trivia fact, most of the time another one looked it up while te conversation continued. When the right answer was found on Google or Wikipedia, that was often a starting point to go more in depth and explore the topic even further. Or it was the start for an new conversation about other topics. To me, that was more fun and satisfying than just waisting time and having to hear endless bullshit around minor unverified facts.
Well, there are still things to be uncertain about that aren't useless trivia, factoids, or urban legends. Hopefully the new BS free era will trickle down to the lower classes, gradually eroding their ignorance and prejudices, at least about one-liner facts.
For those looking for never ending talks and debates about what is true or not, we still have philosophy, religion, and of course politics. Moreover, there's a lot of room the "The Fine Art of Bullshit" there.
Those are divisive topics, those are debates that matter.
For increased social cohesion play-fighting over bullshit is better, there's a subtext that the only reason it's worth it is you actually enjoy the company of those around you.
The segment in question runs from about page 29 through 34.
I unfolded my napkin and got the silverware out. "I don't remember."
She got out her phone.
"No, don't go there."
"I. M. D. B." Her fingers.
"Oh, Cristian Douglas," I said. "It was Cristian Douglas."
Still typing, head leaned back, under the spell of her phone.
Not only bullshit. I remember in one of the Beatles interviews how early on they found out that some guy in town knew the B7 guitar chord. They would get on a bus to meet this guy to learn the chord. This journey would not exist today :(
The story posted in the article provides a romanticized illustration of how finding knowledge in a world without easy access to it can produce an adventure. (I like that it doesn't directly say which of the 1994 or 2014 versions was better, though there's sure an implication from how they're painted.) On the other hand, access to information can produce an adventure, as well; so can many other things. In the end, the right group of friends can end up on wild adventures for any number of reasons.
That's leaving aside the implications of having easy access to information to answer more important questions.
Questions for which there's a known right answer should get resolved as quickly as possible. That leaves more time for the questions that the Internet and all the other resources we have available can help answer, but which still require work. (Whether those questions are useful or just amusingly absurd is up to you.)
> On the other hand, access to information can produce an adventure, as well
How many of us, solo or in a group, ended up reaching for the asked piece of information basically instantly on Wikipedia, yet, serendipitously hooked on by another piece of information, ended up bouncing around page upon page like a pachinko ball until one says "wait, how did we get up to this already?".
I have planned entire holidays using online information, going to places I'd never go to otherwise. While on holiday though I prefer travel guides in book format however.
I think s/he means the type of trolling where you pretend to be monumentally stupid to see whether other people catch on, eg 'what do you mean the world isn't flat, I've been up in a plane so don't think you're fooling me with that round nonsense.'
I don't go in for this but I do find it entertaining to read sometimes.
Trolls are what folks in my day used to call assholes. Trolling isn't just joking with your buddies about something innocuous. It has become an excuse for just being a jerk to people and hoping they don't pop you in the nose. On the other hand there are genuine good pranksters whose craft is finely honed and deserving of appreciation.
Actually Google (and Wikipedia et al) enabled an even more evolved form of bullshit.
The kind were people with shallow (or none) knowledge of a topic check some reference source they half understand and try to pass of as experts in the subject matter...
At least with reference books you had to own them in the first place and get into the trouble to locate a reference in their index etc.
Now any bozo can check an obscure lemma in a matter of seconds and pretend he knows what he's talking about in an online discussion (and often offline), going back to check more details in the process any time his bluff is close to be discovered.
This art is well and truly alive in football(soccer) pubs today, at least in the 10+ ones I frequent on occasion. No one there respects stats or facts or whatever. Everyone is always right.
Except if you find a conspiracy website that say that they are, and your friend will tell you that's a conspiracy and THEY are sibling. That's juste what they want you to believe.
Here in france we have a lot of people that believe theses websites
I'm struggling to identify what it is about this nostalgia that infuriates me so deeply. Perhaps it's just fascinating to me that so many people find it fun to be in stupid situations. I find it barbaric and twisted.
More productively, I wonder how people would respond to this after having grown up with the boundary of their 30s knowledge horizon roughly equivalent to that of humanity's experts 10yr prior. Anyone born since ~2000 perhaps is in this situation. Will they have eliminated this kind of "fun" "bullshit" from their behavior completely?
For me it's the assumption that if since a particular circumstance triggered an interesting social interaction, that the lack of that circumstance would mean that no interesting social interaction would occur.
At the base, it's the same hollow critique of millennials: because they do things differently (e.g. interact socially online as well as in person) they must be missing out on all the great things that the Boomers experienced.
I honestly believe we live our lives for the moments that aren't spent learning.
Facts are facts, and that's just about it.
This behavior is "fun" because their bullshitting about Steven Tyler led to them meeting up with some girls, going to some bars, and having a good night out.
It's weird how all these advancements in technology that were supposed to free up our time have just taken up more of our time.
It's sad, really. Learning used to be an adventure, and sometimes you were wrong. It was a game, even if you knew the answer beforehand.
Now it's a chore, and I really don't see all these bullshit facts being removed from our society today, even though almost everything is a few taps of your iPhone away.
It baffles me how you can call this convoluted process "learning". It's not. It's rightfully called the art of trivia bullshitting and has nothing to do with learning.
It's a purely social process that seems foreign and awkward to a visible majority of the HN crowd. I happen to agree with that crowd, I don't see the fun in it. I don't see the point in it. I wasn't raised to respond positively to this specific situation.
Instead - and again I believe a majority of the people on HN are in the same boat - I get socially interested in people with whom I can have exchanges that have the potential to affect the way I work, I behave or I see the world.
I have a fairly arrogant (but not necessarily incorrect) theory about this. I suspect that when you work/live in an environment which constantly stimulates you intellectually, you have an easier time getting to the "rewarding" part of more intellectual exchanges (eg. the facts of a conversation) than someone who works 9-17 at Walmart, and whose curiosity in the world is not being constantly nurtured, might. Thus we see a large majority of people who do not get any satisfaction from talking about more in-depth subjects than, say, Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore.
And that lack of satisfaction is present on both sides. Once you have tasted what it's like to fire pure knowledge and experience at each other in a conversation and having all parties enjoy it, it's very hard to find any pleasure in exchanging senseless, bullshit factoids that will only serve to be repeated to someone else in the same social situation later on.
You learn about the people that you're bullshitting with. We're social animals, we live in groups, we solve problems in groups, we tackle adversity as groups. Our lives depend on our abilities to function within groups.
Bullshitting is a type of play. Play is important for developing as an individual and for a group developing a shared identity.
I love learning. It's one of the things I spend my free time doing.
I love being able to hold conversations about things I like learning about or know a lot about -- politics, computer science, programming, whatever.
Still, I can't only have intellectually stimulating conversations all day. I'd lose my social skills.
Humans are remarkably social animals. In all reality, our socialness keeps our society flowing and from freezing. A lot of intellectuals like to think they're the ones who keep computers computing, robots robotting, etc., and rightfully so.
But had we all the social skills of some "intellectuals" I've worked with and gone to school with, our communication would be piss-poor and we'd never be able make it anywhere as a country or planet earth.
I say all that because those people, the farmers, politicians, small business owners, managers (even CEOs!), directors -- people who have to deal with the general public -- didn't grow up only seeking conversations where they "fire pure knowledge" at each other.
They went to bars, partied, made friends, bullshitted, watched some mind-numbing TV, played contact sports, read People magazine... you get the point.
Thing is, some of us enjoy the mundane. Ivory towers are a bad thing. Believing there's no joy the non-intellectual aspects of life leads to isolation.
Sounds kind of like a high horse. By this line of thought, are you not saying people of fifteen years ago were barbaric? Have we really become so enlightened and superior since then?
More that we've undergone a pretty significant state change in the past couple decades, and much of how we understand the world now has dependencies on full information access; inflicting variable negative reinforcement on those thought patterns by removing that dependency restricts the smooth transition to a more inclusive and durable self.
My step-dad always posed with his fact-knowledge as if it was the holy grail of wisdom. It even led to this bullshitting in the link. If he didn't know something, he made it up. Or he would tell us about some (anecdotical!) evidence for this and that.
Today, I just flip out my smartphone and look it up and after that, everyone learned something.
Sometimes the facts are so ridiculous or shocking that knowing the truth can be funny or exciting too :)
Read any newspaper article on global warming - the comments section is guaranteed to contain humongous amounts of bullshit. Actually, the comments section on just about any news article is guaranteed to contain humongous amounts of bullshit.
OK, it's not really the fun entertaining sort of bullshit, but you've got to take what you can get.
121 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThere's a dark side to bullshit. There's a side which creates endless pain for no good reason, because things 'sound good' or are 'too good to check' and nobody likes a party-pooper, do they? Especially when the party-pooper is pointing out how this little piece of bullshit could kill someone.
No. Go along to get along. Don't be so serious all the time. Don't imagine you know better. It's rude.
Alternatively, I invoke Poe's Law in case I'm being That Guy. (Tone's hard on the Internet - it's much better to play in person!)
I had to show them recent videos of Bobby McFerrin, his webpage, and then prove he had done that song.
Sure, look it up when you get home. But a little group self-discipline goes far in keeping the fine art of bullshitting alive.
(And it's not just the answer that kills the conversation, but also the fact that someone is right and someone is wrong, game over. Much better to keep the game going!)
I agree with you. That sounds like much more fun.
On the other hand I find it incredibly difficult to shut up when someone says something wrong about computing (or usually about some current affairs topic in computing). Don't be that guy.
I look it as an opportunity to see how many people outside the computing field see it. It's sometimes horrifying, but on the other hand, my most common reaction is "that explains so much".
Conversation is sharing personal interpretations of the world. It should be ok to be wrong. You'll always gain far more insight in to people around you, build closer bonds with them, and have more fun if you're willing to let a few trivial mistakes slide.
Conversation is not simply sharing facts.
Gradually, I've recognized the artifice that goes into these constraints and their denial of the human condition - especially since I can observe them become increasingly unprepared to perform this task as they get older and so lean on me more and more to drive the topics, while getting agitated and defensive if I deviate from the chosen railroad.
Why anyone would ever choose bullshit over facts is beyond me. Facts are interesting. Facts are fun. Bullshit is just the unrestrained spew of the ignorant ego. There's no point to it other than mate competition, and making what amount to factual claims that are known to be false so you can score is what created a vast amount of human misery for untold thousands of years, and continues to do so in the less enlightened parts of the world (philosophy departments, for example...)
I'd much rather find out the facts and discuss them--and there is always something for anyone who isn't completely brain-dead to discuss--than listen to some egotistical ignoramous spew nonsense, and then have to argue against them knowing that in the absence of facts the standard of proof is "what just makes sense", which only an idiot would take as an interesting guide to reality, because reality, in the absence of facts, does not make sense.
Quantum mechanics? Totally incoherent.
Evolution? Pull the other one.
The Earth moves in an elliptical path around the sun and the wandering stars are huge balls of gas and rock? Ridiculous!
In a world before we invented the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference--that is, science--people based their ideas on the "game" you are describing. If you're a member of SCA I guess it might be fun to continue it, but from an epistemologist's point of view it looks about as civilized as cat mauling as a means of social entertainment.
Such things are best left in the Middle Ages, where they belong.
Who goes to his friend's place and wants to google?
I'd rather go somewhere without them.
Rule: all phones head down in a stack. That's it, go enjoy people a little
Or, if you know your friends well enough to guess what they're going to say, it's the art of picking the third or fourth dialog choice from the top, Monkey Island style. And if you're really friends, they'll do the same and it'll work.
And then there was the other side, where you tried to derive the answer. One of my favorites was attempting to determine if you could neglect the earth's core in modeling gravity; ferocious debate for an hour and a half by a dozen engineers. Best lunch ever.
Really, this is more about people being boring. Jumping immediately to the obvious instead of enjoying a meandering argumentative stroll. It's a way to play. Simple as that.
Otherwise you're just the adult saying, "that's not lava, that's carpet." Killjoy is the word, I think.
Edit: Ah, here we go: Mornington Crescent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjOsOB4erZI
I think you nailed it with the shenanigans reference. So long as it doesn't cross the border into inappropriateness or blatant insults it's just lighthearted humor to break the ice or stimulate conversation. After all, if we wanted boring robots to talk to there's always SmarterChild.
Was the real conversation better than that?
It wandered like that. It was a direct result of our introduction to modeling in the early core engineering courses. Wherein we abuse the power of deciding what gets into the model. (It all started with one person noting that we frequently neglect gravity in electrical engineering.)
"I always tell guys, put away your phone and work on your car. Nobody ever got laid in the back seat of an iPhone." - Billy Gardell
Or when something is on the tip of your tongue for an hour.
I believe I'm missing some profound point that the TFA is apparently making.
For increased social cohesion play-fighting over bullshit is better, there's a subtext that the only reason it's worth it is you actually enjoy the company of those around you.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5764687/CLOSURE.pdf
The segment in question runs from about page 29 through 34.
That's leaving aside the implications of having easy access to information to answer more important questions.
Questions for which there's a known right answer should get resolved as quickly as possible. That leaves more time for the questions that the Internet and all the other resources we have available can help answer, but which still require work. (Whether those questions are useful or just amusingly absurd is up to you.)
Just look at XKCD's What If (https://what-if.xkcd.com/), which references online information but nonetheless puts it together in novel ways (density of seawater and approximate volume of a bowling ball gives the minimum weight required for a bowling ball to sink). In the future, that post (https://what-if.xkcd.com/125/) will show up on the other end of a very strange set of search terms, but there will always be many more questions where that came from, and there are myriad examples online of detailed reasoning from fictional premises. For instance, see http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ , http://physicswithportals.com/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize , or https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uG3_RgX9JA0/TboU21S9gNI/AAAAAAAAD... .
How many of us, solo or in a group, ended up reaching for the asked piece of information basically instantly on Wikipedia, yet, serendipitously hooked on by another piece of information, ended up bouncing around page upon page like a pachinko ball until one says "wait, how did we get up to this already?".
http://youtu.be/PQ4o1N4ksyQ
Hilarious. We're not quite there yet, but soon though. Just wait until we go from predictive search to preemptive search.
There are claims which have no proof or disproof on the web.
You have to be more creative in 2015.
There are claims which have no proof or disproof on the web.
You have to be more creative in 2015.
I don't go in for this but I do find it entertaining to read sometimes.
The kind were people with shallow (or none) knowledge of a topic check some reference source they half understand and try to pass of as experts in the subject matter...
At least with reference books you had to own them in the first place and get into the trouble to locate a reference in their index etc.
Now any bozo can check an obscure lemma in a matter of seconds and pretend he knows what he's talking about in an online discussion (and often offline), going back to check more details in the process any time his bluff is close to be discovered.
The old 'Swear to God' that would prove any piece of fine BS to your friends, is no longer valid. Swear to Google is the new 'believe me'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVxOLew_cU (towards the end).
Here in france we have a lot of people that believe theses websites
More productively, I wonder how people would respond to this after having grown up with the boundary of their 30s knowledge horizon roughly equivalent to that of humanity's experts 10yr prior. Anyone born since ~2000 perhaps is in this situation. Will they have eliminated this kind of "fun" "bullshit" from their behavior completely?
2. No one ever lies again
3. ???
4. Star Trek becomes real
At the base, it's the same hollow critique of millennials: because they do things differently (e.g. interact socially online as well as in person) they must be missing out on all the great things that the Boomers experienced.
Facts are facts, and that's just about it.
This behavior is "fun" because their bullshitting about Steven Tyler led to them meeting up with some girls, going to some bars, and having a good night out.
It's weird how all these advancements in technology that were supposed to free up our time have just taken up more of our time.
It's sad, really. Learning used to be an adventure, and sometimes you were wrong. It was a game, even if you knew the answer beforehand.
Now it's a chore, and I really don't see all these bullshit facts being removed from our society today, even though almost everything is a few taps of your iPhone away.
It's a purely social process that seems foreign and awkward to a visible majority of the HN crowd. I happen to agree with that crowd, I don't see the fun in it. I don't see the point in it. I wasn't raised to respond positively to this specific situation.
Instead - and again I believe a majority of the people on HN are in the same boat - I get socially interested in people with whom I can have exchanges that have the potential to affect the way I work, I behave or I see the world.
I have a fairly arrogant (but not necessarily incorrect) theory about this. I suspect that when you work/live in an environment which constantly stimulates you intellectually, you have an easier time getting to the "rewarding" part of more intellectual exchanges (eg. the facts of a conversation) than someone who works 9-17 at Walmart, and whose curiosity in the world is not being constantly nurtured, might. Thus we see a large majority of people who do not get any satisfaction from talking about more in-depth subjects than, say, Steven Tyler and Mary Tyler Moore.
And that lack of satisfaction is present on both sides. Once you have tasted what it's like to fire pure knowledge and experience at each other in a conversation and having all parties enjoy it, it's very hard to find any pleasure in exchanging senseless, bullshit factoids that will only serve to be repeated to someone else in the same social situation later on.
Like in programming: a lot of "functions" don't return anything, they're ran for side-effects.
Bullshitting is a type of play. Play is important for developing as an individual and for a group developing a shared identity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)
I love being able to hold conversations about things I like learning about or know a lot about -- politics, computer science, programming, whatever.
Still, I can't only have intellectually stimulating conversations all day. I'd lose my social skills.
Humans are remarkably social animals. In all reality, our socialness keeps our society flowing and from freezing. A lot of intellectuals like to think they're the ones who keep computers computing, robots robotting, etc., and rightfully so.
But had we all the social skills of some "intellectuals" I've worked with and gone to school with, our communication would be piss-poor and we'd never be able make it anywhere as a country or planet earth.
I say all that because those people, the farmers, politicians, small business owners, managers (even CEOs!), directors -- people who have to deal with the general public -- didn't grow up only seeking conversations where they "fire pure knowledge" at each other.
They went to bars, partied, made friends, bullshitted, watched some mind-numbing TV, played contact sports, read People magazine... you get the point.
Thing is, some of us enjoy the mundane. Ivory towers are a bad thing. Believing there's no joy the non-intellectual aspects of life leads to isolation.
Sounds kind of like a high horse. By this line of thought, are you not saying people of fifteen years ago were barbaric? Have we really become so enlightened and superior since then?
They find different ways of having fun and bullshitting.
This was exposed quite starkly with this story: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
If you exclude the pro/cons comments (and the abuse) you're left with loads of "charities have the cure, they are holding them back"
they defy sense, yet are reassured by the people about them.
You best not believe much you see on the Internet! So much crap is made up and goes viral for surprise the almighty dollar.
My step-dad always posed with his fact-knowledge as if it was the holy grail of wisdom. It even led to this bullshitting in the link. If he didn't know something, he made it up. Or he would tell us about some (anecdotical!) evidence for this and that.
Today, I just flip out my smartphone and look it up and after that, everyone learned something.
Sometimes the facts are so ridiculous or shocking that knowing the truth can be funny or exciting too :)
OK, it's not really the fun entertaining sort of bullshit, but you've got to take what you can get.