6 ms·

Bullshit asymmetry principle

85 points by kyleblarson 8y ago

Alex3917 8y ago
Same as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- nabla9 8y ago
  As a legal term and technique: Chewbacca defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
laszlokorte 8y ago
There is a german proverb a have often heard as a kid but now that I searched for I could not find any sources. It goes like "Wenn ein dummer einen Stein ins Wasser wirft, braucht es 10 kluge, um ihn wieder raus zu bekommen." which translates as "If a dumb person throws a stone into the water it takes 10 smart people to get it back out."
- hcho 8y ago
  Turkish has a very similar proverb. I wonder if it is a literal translation.
wslh 8y ago
Not always but often. My two cents: a few years ago we were building a cryptographic extension to support ECC and since ECC and protocols using it are relatively new comparing to RSA or Diffie-Hellman it is more difficult to answer questions quickly. Someone on the customer side asked a question combining acronyms like ECDH, ECIES, etc in a way that you cannot make a clear connection between all the concepts. We spend a few days just trying to make sense of the question to finally realized it was no sense.
canjobear 8y ago
Could this be used as part of a formal definition of bullshit?
nathanyukai 8y ago
I feel like this can be related to 'entropy will always increase in isolated system'. Creating bullshit is easy(require little energy), which increases entropy. while debunk bullshit is trying to reduce entrypy, so lot of energy need to be put in the the system?
- dhimes 8y ago
  Second Law of Bullshit.
viburnum 8y ago
This is basically how cryptography works (one way functions).
trhway 8y ago
dual principle - "The amount of energy [and intelligence] needed to understand refutation of a bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to consume the bullshit.
- dhimes 8y ago
  Since you are now dealing with observables are you bordering on the Quantum Bullshit Theory? Maybe an S operator for scattering bullshit. Time independent Hamiltonian for Steady-State bullshit. etc.
  - trhway 8y ago
    Given the reality distortion, frame dragging and other properties i think it is better described by gravity style theories.
tabtab 8y ago
Indeed! Our "architect" (cough) stuck us with mass microservices even though we are too small a group to need them. Bloatville. He kept quoting "separation of concerns" and other "magic Legos" abstraction/reuse/modularity BS memes. Plain ol' OOP classes do all the same. I've been fighting to debunk it, but so far losing. It's more a case of momentum and if-aint-broke-dont-fix than logic so far. Nobody seems to want productivity enough yet to care, so if they pay me to mow the lawn with tweezers, I'll tweeze away...
- madeuptempacct 8y ago
  Oh hey, I had the same issue. Except micro-services eventually lost. Having class libraries in NuGet did work well for us (we are open source). Next trend to die soon: TDD / "Unit tests" that mock half the app
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  People with "architect" in the title generally are a problem especially if they don't code anymore. I think architecture should done by the senior engineers who work on the codebase. If necessary they still can coordinate with other teams.
- phakding 8y ago
  In ideal world, your technical argument would be enough for higher-ups to take your concerns seriously. In real world, it's mostly how much they like and trust you. If they don't, then validity of your argument will be of no value.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    In the real world you can't evaluate every argument. It just takes too long. I definitely filter by people who I know usually have good ideas vs. others whose ideas never make sense.
- konschubert 8y ago
  The way to fight bullshit is not by trying to refute it, which would be futile due to the bullshit asymmetry principle. The way to go is to offer a compelling alternative. Of course, this applies only if the bullshit has been confirmed as such and if the person promoting it has shown to be uninterested in a sincere and fair argumentative discussion.
platz 8y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/07/an-information-age-glossary/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/07/an-information-age-glo... Bullshit: (1) Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said (my short version of of Harry Frankfurt’s definition in On Bullshit. See also, the Wikipedia summary). (2) Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does (my version, which I think is roughly equivalent). (3) Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility (4) Non-requisite variety Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention. Ephemeralization: The natural conversion of signal into bullshit through creative destruction (derived from original definition due to Buckminister Fuller). Arbitrage: Exploiting bullshit for profit. Weaponization: Separation of data into information and bullshit, and deliberate direction of the two signals at different systems (generally a hunting party and a cargo cult respectively), with the intention of creating serendipity in one system and zemblanity in another.
whack 8y ago
The most efficient way to deal with this asymmetry: 1. Pick a random sample of someone's claims and statements 2. Research them thoroughly, so as to figure out if they are bullshit 3. If a sufficiently large percentage of their statements are bullshit, do not bother listening to anything else they say. Not even to "give them a fair hearing", because it will occupy all your time and energy. 4. Re-calibrate every 5-10 years, in case the person/organization has changed over that period The above algorithm is particularly useful in dealing with the steady stream of bullshit that arises out of particular media outlets and political figures.
- dhimes 8y ago
  I'm stealing this and spreading it as far as I can.
- anoncake 8y ago
  The problem with that is that other people will listen to their bullshit and, chances are, nobody will contradict them. So the bullshit spreads.
- nabla9 8y ago
  When you can identify the source of bullshit to single entity, it's easier to notice and ignore. What is really hard to recognize is bullshit that just "floats around" without single source.
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Nice that might be a worthwhile mindset, although I think 10 years might be a bit much. Edit: I don't think I am qualified to say that, as I didn't live my second 10 yet PS: Well you got to my no-BS list
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This can be difficult though. For example, there is a frequent phenomenon on HN where certain posts arise for purposes of cheerleading the specific programming languages Nim and Julia. A ton of the comments, disguising as good natured, that give more or less unqualified praise to these languages are actually mostly bullshit, eapecially two very specific strands of discussion, which are usually about Nim or Julia capabilities compared with Cython, and to a lesser degree sometimes Julia’s multi dispatch templating patterns. It is so hard to wade through those comments and follow down every link and cultish argument or counter-counter-argument, meanwhile you’ve got people claiming that perfectly reasonable criticisms of those languages are themselves the “real” bullshit. It turns into such a convoluted mess that everybody is certain that everybody else’s claims are the bullshit and that their own claims (which other people think are the bullshit) are genuinely refuting bullshit. By the end of it, a strategy like yours becomes very hard because the time complexity of the research task gets intractable even for a small subset of claims. Like literally once I had to go and read a ~30 page published research article to learn that a certain Julia differential equations library happens to use a particular multi dispatch templating pattern to offer a way to treat uncertainty modeling as a built-in, domain-specific construct, but that this was not some type of advantage of Julia or anything (since you could do literally the same thing at the same level of abstraction in Cython), and nor was it even a required aspect of the differential equation domain problem, it was just a sort of extra feature that worked out in that library, but which could be implemented (arguably more simply) without any of the multi dispatch behavior at all. Blerg. I had to wade into all that, ten levels deep in some nested conversation with hard to believe one-sided support of Julia, all just to learn that one single point could be refuted!
DalekBaldwin 8y ago
Christopher Date and Hugh Darwen, in their work on type systems and the relational model, like to use the Principle of Incoherence: "A principle, sometimes invoked in defense of a less than fully successful attempt at criticizing some technical issue, to the effect that it's hard to criticize something coherently if what's being criticized is itself not very coherent in the first place. Occasionally referred to, a little unkindly, as The Incoherent Principle."
jancsika 8y ago
Refuting bullshit is actually 10x easier than coming up with bullshit in the first place. The reason people think it's the other way around is a testament to the power of appeal to authority.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
  Refuting it is easy. Convincing someone that the bullshit they believe is wrong is an entirely different matter. See: Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and birthers.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    Actually what I wrote is bullshit. I have no idea what the average time is to come up with bullshit vs. average time spent refuting it. So color me convinced. On the other hand, it took me about 10 seconds to write the previous paragraph but about 100 seconds to decide how to word my initial bullshit. So I my initial bullshit stands. :)
nabla9 8y ago
Russian propaganda war is based on this principle. They are not transmitting coherent alternative narrative. They as just delivering constant stream of bullshit faster than it can be debunked. Just increasing the cognitive load and creating cognitive dissonance is a valid propaganda method.
- nayuki 8y ago
  It's reminiscent of what's going on in China now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
anon49124 8y ago
Telfon Don Drumpf generates BS faster than even John Moschitta Jr. can call it out.

85 points by kyleblarson 8y ago

Alex3917 8y ago

Same as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

nabla9 8y ago
As a legal term and technique: Chewbacca defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense

laszlokorte 8y ago

There is a german proverb a have often heard as a kid but now that I searched for I could not find any sources. It goes like "Wenn ein dummer einen Stein ins Wasser wirft, braucht es 10 kluge, um ihn wieder raus zu bekommen." which translates as "If a dumb person throws a stone into the water it takes 10 smart people to get it back out."

hcho 8y ago
Turkish has a very similar proverb. I wonder if it is a literal translation.

wslh 8y ago

Not always but often. My two cents: a few years ago we were building a cryptographic extension to support ECC and since ECC and protocols using it are relatively new comparing to RSA or Diffie-Hellman it is more difficult to answer questions quickly. Someone on the customer side asked a question combining acronyms like ECDH, ECIES, etc in a way that you cannot make a clear connection between all the concepts. We spend a few days just trying to make sense of the question to finally realized it was no sense.

canjobear 8y ago

Could this be used as part of a formal definition of bullshit?

nathanyukai 8y ago

I feel like this can be related to 'entropy will always increase in isolated system'. Creating bullshit is easy(require little energy), which increases entropy. while debunk bullshit is trying to reduce entrypy, so lot of energy need to be put in the the system?

dhimes 8y ago
Second Law of Bullshit.

viburnum 8y ago

This is basically how cryptography works (one way functions).

trhway 8y ago

dual principle - "The amount of energy [and intelligence] needed to understand refutation of a bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to consume the bullshit.

dhimes 8y ago
Since you are now dealing with observables are you bordering on the Quantum Bullshit Theory? Maybe an S operator for scattering bullshit. Time independent Hamiltonian for Steady-State bullshit. etc.
- trhway 8y ago
  Given the reality distortion, frame dragging and other properties i think it is better described by gravity style theories.

tabtab 8y ago

Indeed! Our "architect" (cough) stuck us with mass microservices even though we are too small a group to need them. Bloatville. He kept quoting "separation of concerns" and other "magic Legos" abstraction/reuse/modularity BS memes. Plain ol' OOP classes do all the same. I've been fighting to debunk it, but so far losing. It's more a case of momentum and if-aint-broke-dont-fix than logic so far. Nobody seems to want productivity enough yet to care, so if they pay me to mow the lawn with tweezers, I'll tweeze away...

madeuptempacct 8y ago
Oh hey, I had the same issue. Except micro-services eventually lost. Having class libraries in NuGet did work well for us (we are open source). Next trend to die soon: TDD / "Unit tests" that mock half the app
maxxxxx 8y ago
People with "architect" in the title generally are a problem especially if they don't code anymore. I think architecture should done by the senior engineers who work on the codebase. If necessary they still can coordinate with other teams.
phakding 8y ago
In ideal world, your technical argument would be enough for higher-ups to take your concerns seriously. In real world, it's mostly how much they like and trust you. If they don't, then validity of your argument will be of no value.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  In the real world you can't evaluate every argument. It just takes too long. I definitely filter by people who I know usually have good ideas vs. others whose ideas never make sense.
konschubert 8y ago
The way to fight bullshit is not by trying to refute it, which would be futile due to the bullshit asymmetry principle. The way to go is to offer a compelling alternative. Of course, this applies only if the bullshit has been confirmed as such and if the person promoting it has shown to be uninterested in a sincere and fair argumentative discussion.

platz 8y ago

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/07/an-information-age-glossary/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/07/an-information-age-glo... Bullshit: (1) Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said (my short version of of Harry Frankfurt’s definition in On Bullshit. See also, the Wikipedia summary). (2) Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does (my version, which I think is roughly equivalent). (3) Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility (4) Non-requisite variety Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention. Ephemeralization: The natural conversion of signal into bullshit through creative destruction (derived from original definition due to Buckminister Fuller). Arbitrage: Exploiting bullshit for profit. Weaponization: Separation of data into information and bullshit, and deliberate direction of the two signals at different systems (generally a hunting party and a cargo cult respectively), with the intention of creating serendipity in one system and zemblanity in another.

whack 8y ago

The most efficient way to deal with this asymmetry: 1. Pick a random sample of someone's claims and statements 2. Research them thoroughly, so as to figure out if they are bullshit 3. If a sufficiently large percentage of their statements are bullshit, do not bother listening to anything else they say. Not even to "give them a fair hearing", because it will occupy all your time and energy. 4. Re-calibrate every 5-10 years, in case the person/organization has changed over that period The above algorithm is particularly useful in dealing with the steady stream of bullshit that arises out of particular media outlets and political figures.

dhimes 8y ago
I'm stealing this and spreading it as far as I can.
anoncake 8y ago
The problem with that is that other people will listen to their bullshit and, chances are, nobody will contradict them. So the bullshit spreads.
nabla9 8y ago
When you can identify the source of bullshit to single entity, it's easier to notice and ignore. What is really hard to recognize is bullshit that just "floats around" without single source.
O_H_E 8y ago
Nice that might be a worthwhile mindset, although I think 10 years might be a bit much. Edit: I don't think I am qualified to say that, as I didn't live my second 10 yet PS: Well you got to my no-BS list
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This can be difficult though. For example, there is a frequent phenomenon on HN where certain posts arise for purposes of cheerleading the specific programming languages Nim and Julia. A ton of the comments, disguising as good natured, that give more or less unqualified praise to these languages are actually mostly bullshit, eapecially two very specific strands of discussion, which are usually about Nim or Julia capabilities compared with Cython, and to a lesser degree sometimes Julia’s multi dispatch templating patterns. It is so hard to wade through those comments and follow down every link and cultish argument or counter-counter-argument, meanwhile you’ve got people claiming that perfectly reasonable criticisms of those languages are themselves the “real” bullshit. It turns into such a convoluted mess that everybody is certain that everybody else’s claims are the bullshit and that their own claims (which other people think are the bullshit) are genuinely refuting bullshit. By the end of it, a strategy like yours becomes very hard because the time complexity of the research task gets intractable even for a small subset of claims. Like literally once I had to go and read a ~30 page published research article to learn that a certain Julia differential equations library happens to use a particular multi dispatch templating pattern to offer a way to treat uncertainty modeling as a built-in, domain-specific construct, but that this was not some type of advantage of Julia or anything (since you could do literally the same thing at the same level of abstraction in Cython), and nor was it even a required aspect of the differential equation domain problem, it was just a sort of extra feature that worked out in that library, but which could be implemented (arguably more simply) without any of the multi dispatch behavior at all. Blerg. I had to wade into all that, ten levels deep in some nested conversation with hard to believe one-sided support of Julia, all just to learn that one single point could be refuted!

DalekBaldwin 8y ago

Christopher Date and Hugh Darwen, in their work on type systems and the relational model, like to use the Principle of Incoherence: "A principle, sometimes invoked in defense of a less than fully successful attempt at criticizing some technical issue, to the effect that it's hard to criticize something coherently if what's being criticized is itself not very coherent in the first place. Occasionally referred to, a little unkindly, as The Incoherent Principle."

jancsika 8y ago

Refuting bullshit is actually 10x easier than coming up with bullshit in the first place. The reason people think it's the other way around is a testament to the power of appeal to authority.

Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
Refuting it is easy. Convincing someone that the bullshit they believe is wrong is an entirely different matter. See: Flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and birthers.
- jancsika 8y ago
  Actually what I wrote is bullshit. I have no idea what the average time is to come up with bullshit vs. average time spent refuting it. So color me convinced. On the other hand, it took me about 10 seconds to write the previous paragraph but about 100 seconds to decide how to word my initial bullshit. So I my initial bullshit stands. :)

nabla9 8y ago

Russian propaganda war is based on this principle. They are not transmitting coherent alternative narrative. They as just delivering constant stream of bullshit faster than it can be debunked. Just increasing the cognitive load and creating cognitive dissonance is a valid propaganda method.

nayuki 8y ago
It's reminiscent of what's going on in China now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

anon49124 8y ago

Telfon Don Drumpf generates BS faster than even John Moschitta Jr. can call it out.