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> 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 si

• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  No, it was that on the surface the claims being made seemed flimsy, but the overall discussion was so full of debate and forceful counter-claims of which party is or isn’t bullshitting that as an outside reader I couldn’t tell anything about it. I didn’t have to read deeply into one niche topic to form an informed opinion about it. Rather I had to read deeply into one niche topic just to even close the loop on understanding if a basic sense that someone was bullshitting about a generic, high-level thing was warranted in a simple heuristic sort of way. Basically, the convoluted bullshit acts like an obfuscator that makes you need to do an unreasonable amount of legwork to get to a point you can safely trust just a generic appraisal of whether something is / isn’t bullshit. This is a problem because bandwidth is limited. You can’t go reading 30 page articles every time you want to decide which of two general strands of a conversation have any merit for further engagement, and the noise pumped by bullshitters (especially when they are claiming they’re not the bullshitter and that it’s really you or someone else) makes this harder and harder all the time.