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Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over
- robocat 6y agoVery well written, with some excellent tongue-in-cheek humour. I love this quote: “One informant told Jackall that his job involved ‘characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters . . . Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game’ (Jackall, 1986, p. 145). A crucial aspect was not using too much or too little bullshit, and also being able to judge the appropriate moment to bullshit. Competent bullshitters also needed to become competent audience members for performances of bullshit. They had to learn that bullshit should not be taken too seriously and it should be engaged with in just the right way. If you took bullshit too seriously, you ran the risk of being seen as a chump. Likewise, if you challenged bullshit too frequently, you risked being seen as an asshole.”
- bsenftner 6y agoThis describes the Mindfullness meditation movement accurately. They are frauds with a mental toy that latches onto people with anxiety, for profit.
- iancmceachern 6y agoI dont understand this comment, please elaborate. I've found meditation and the like helpful, haven't paid a dime to anyone for it and so am confused.
- bsenftner 6y agoMeditation itself is great and I'm a practitioner myself. But my experience watching the growth of Mindfullness has been observing a series of over reaching claims, each being addressed by some book, seminar, or class "solving" the issue for a price. Some higher anxiety, over worked friends have been sucked into these social circles and milked for all kinds of expensive books, seminars, lectures, sessions, and what ever other made up term for that specialized form of theater that costs far more than a movie ticket.
- foobar_ 6y agoConceptual entrepreneurs almost sounds like a good thing. Bullshit is a lie with an ideological bent.
- Merrill 6y ago"Conceptual entrepreneurs" might describe most conspiracy theorists.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoHypothetical billionaires and conceptual entrepreneurs are potentially good candidates for the president seat.
- throwaway888abc 6y agoBullshit Jobs: A Conversation with David Graeber https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/07/04/bullshit-jobs-a-conversation-with-david-graeber/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/07/04/bullshit-jobs-a-co...
- valand 6y agoAt first glance this looks like a joke However it holds certain degrees of reality behind the humors It is one good way to bring up an unquantifiable yet risky problem to people's awareness
- robocat 6y agoDid you follow the references to other papers? It seems to be well researched, and much of the information seems to resonate with my own experience. I wish I could learn the technique through a course or something because I have seen how valuable the skill is. I mostly skimmed the article, but in my experience I have seen some excellent bullshitters have high social status. I can recall two CEOs (one guy, one woman) with glib tongues: he is smart and successful, and I never understood the woman (but she cycled through multiple companies so she had external validation). Another female friend bullshits successfully at work and within her peer group. My friend doesn’t use bullshit words but instead there’s a kind of Teflon irrelevancy to a lot of what she says (she is also well smart, with an intuition that works).
- gdrift 6y agoSufficiently advanced talk about bullshit is indistinguishable from bullshit.
- Nevermark 6y agoExactly. As one's bullshit meta-knowledge increases, the precise jargon required to distinguish between higher and lower level's of bullshit, and the relative meaning topology between bullshit in overlapping social contexts, will eventually sound like actual bullshit to the pre-initiate bullshit novice. I think I stated all that with proper precision.