7 ms·

We Live in the Age of the Bullshitter

73 points by robtherobber 4y ago

mdp2021 4y ago
A recommended read, mostly for awareness. Two notes: -- it is argued that "bullshitting is not lying, as the true/false state remains unknown to the actor because considered irrelevant": well, no, it is still substantially lying, as a disregard for truth. And I am not even checking philology, as I would normally do before discussing meanings: this is not a matter about the meaning of 'true' or 'lie', but substantial ethics. -- it is noted that we do not have enough "bullshit checkers". Now that is not the node: the node remains culture, intelligence, education, for many reasons; one of them is that "truth content" is not trivial and cannot be checked by anyone and cheaply and decisively. Boosting the fundamentals limits the undesirable phenomenon and more; just fighting the undesirable phenomenon will not guarantee "a step forwards" and will not be "a step above".
- skybrian 4y ago
  As can be seen in any online forum, being somewhat indifferent to knowing the facts is normal in ordinary conversation. This is how rumor, gossip, and speculation work. If you're going to call that lying, most people are lying most of the time. It's only in some formal writing that you go out of your way to check everything.
  - watwut 4y ago
    It is still lying. Most people when they talk, they are not trying to bullshit. They may be wrong, but they are not indifferent to the notion of truth.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > indifferent to knowing the facts is normal in ordinary conversation ...With that one is brought back to philology: that would be "normal" "descriptively, or according to frequency", but not "prescriptively, or according to norm" :) > If you're going to call that lying Not just me, I grant you, but a long tradition. Yes, not holding truth as a "ground condition" is regarded as lying (i.e. further distinctions have little matter). > rumor, gossip, and speculation Not in context. Reporting rumors, in the form of "Some say X" or "Some say X under conditions C", is a normal statement with T/F values. A "gossipper" ("godsibling", "acquired relative") reports rumors about an "inner circle" and falls in the other case. Speculation works through hypoteticals, which in the form "There are grounds to state that if A then probably B" is again a normal statement with T/F (and TF/~T~F) values.
    - skybrian 4y ago
      A gossiper reports rumors without doing any checking for accuracy. That seems rather indifferent to the truth? Phrasing it as a technically true statement by adding “some say” in front is still rather indifferent to the truth of the rumor, as normally understood. Similarly, statements of the form “if X were true then Y would be true” are independent of the actual truth value of X, which is often unknown. If you care whether X is true or not, it’s entirely unhelpful. It’s indifferent to the truth of X because it’s an independent statement. These can be seen as forms of bullshitting that avoids being technically incorrect. It’s sort of like we’re doing now. We’re not discussing the ground truth of anything concrete.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        You seem to be referring to linguistic contexts in which the purpose is not aletic (or in the direction of aletic) but emotional (etc). (For what the hypotetical are concerned, they are T/F statements... They do not access a truth in the set of instanced facts, but one in the logical realm - still not BSing.) The dimensions can be relatively independent - so you could plot the instances on a Cartesian graph, one axis describing the "adherence to Truth", the other other practical intents. You may be comforting, you may be selling, etc.: you can do all of that without lying. Here we are discussing: it is not impossible that somebody came just to pass the time (purpose), with utter disregard to any truth, and that may facilitate drifting towards bullshitting - but it a more fitting idea to regard exchangers as investigators over some matter, which is still an aletic activity, and the opposite of BSing.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >one of them is that "truth content" is not trivial and cannot be checked by anyone and cheaply and decisively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
mountaintimefrm 4y ago
Since 2011 I've been calling it megalobamboozlementarianism.
mythhouse 4y ago
I read the whole article expecting to read how this 'age' is particularly prone to bullshitting vs other ages, but didn't see anything. Or perhaps the author is one such bullshiter himself making a point with clickbait bullshit.
jonahbenton 4y ago
FWIW, a moment's reflection suggests this is not new. The dawn of the "modern era" in the west is attributed to the rise of Jesus, and, forgive me but what are the various stories of Jesus other than total ridiculous bullshit- reincarnation, "immaculate conception", all the other nonsense- intended to build and maintain the social and financial control structures that existed at the time? I have not studied concrete instances of bullshit in the middle ages but the post-Enlightenment (a bullshit term if ever there was one) was riddled with bullshit. And then the late 1800s in the US featured "snake oil salesman" and "wildcat banking"- these sales pitches are literally indistinguishable from those described in the article. Technology changes the diffusion rate and potentially the effectiveness of the art of the bullshitter (debatable) but the art itself is ancient.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I think the key is that everybody expected that technology would decrease the effectiveness of bullshitting. Local bullshitting relies on there being nobody in the room to say "BS" -- or at least, a small enough number that wishful thinking could dominate. And the bullshitter knew that their time was limited before somebody called them out. The truth-tellers were expected to have an advantage: once the truth was seen, most people would recognize and accept it. The bullshitter's advantage was the slow speed of information diffusion. Turns out that is wrong. People are regularly given definitive rejections of bullshit, and they deny them. It's not that they haven't seen it, but that they choose to accept the bullshitter's reality. We always expected to be able to fool some of the people all of the time... but we assumed that "some" was a number in the single-digit percentages, not a majority or near majority of the (connected, first) world. I still don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty glum, to be honest. And I believe that's a lot of the point. I think that a lot of people choose to accept bullshit precisely because they think it hurts people they don't like. They may even grasp that it's false, but simply don't care. The negative consequences to them are sufficiently far off as to be dismissed, but the upside of having people angry at them is immediate.
  - Atheros 4y ago
    I think that you are severely overestimating the number of people who believe the political bullshit. A much simpler explanation is that the vast majority are simply lying about believing it. How would American right-wing voters behave if they actually believed that the election was stolen? They would boycott voting and they would do it loudly. But they don't actually believe it. There is a word for this type of lie: vranyo. Lying about believing that Trump will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it distracts you from addressing their actual motivations which they know are cruel and unjust.
humanistbot 4y ago
Bullshitting is a centuries-old phenomena, nothing unique about our age. Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" was a 1985 essay that got turned into a 2005 best selling book. Which itself restates a thesis by Mark Twain's 1880 "On the Decay of the Art of Lying."
Eumenes 4y ago
Reminds me of current HR departments and the thought leadership that surround them.
- scatterhead 4y ago
  Maybe tell us how?
jmugan 4y ago
It starts out strong, identifying bullshitters on the left and right, but if Obama and Pinker are bullshitters, I'm not sure the label has much meaning. Which is a shame, because I too have been surprised at how little the truth seems to mean to people.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  He conflates world class bullshitters with people who just speak off the cuff about things they don't know much about, or people who make predictions that turn out to be wrong, or even just people with whom he disagrees, but who are generally pretty earnest in their beliefs, right or wrong. These aren't the same, and it muddies the waters. I agree that the most extreme cases of post-truth celebrity liars, while perhaps not a new phenomenon, may be parts, symptoms, or mechanisms of some new phenomenon that really deserves to be thoughtfully explored. But this article ain't that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  The author's definition of bullshitter is "people I don't like". The Trump and Musk cases are fairly obvious, IMO. Even many of their proponents would agree both have a propensity for "bullshit" at times. Obama is already a bit more murky: I certainly share the author's disappointment in how the Obama presidency turned out, but it's not clear to me if he really was "bullshitting" or if he started out with genuine intentions and just overestimated the difficulties he would run in to – even if we assume Obama was bulshitting to some degree, the political difficulties he faced are no doubt a huge factor (I used to joke that the GOP could be replaced by an extremely advanced AI which consists of "if proposed_by('obama') then oppose() endif"). I haven't followed Pinker's more recent work very closely (I read two of his older books from the early 2000s), but the article that's linked to prove the point (by the same author) does not make a convincing case. Maybe he can come off as a bit arrogant at times, which is a fair enough criticism, but that does not make one a "bullshitter". He cites “Many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one.” as the first example of "utterly irrational swipes at those to the left of him"? Seriously? My feelings about some of the other citation are a bit more mixed, but none of them seem "bullshitting" to me: just a guy voicing his opinion that you may or may not agree with in a way that you may or may not like. In short, this is the umpteenth attempt to make "I don't like it" somehow sound more authoritative. Which sounds like ... ehm, bulshitting to me.
gravitate 4y ago
Refuting bullshit is a pain. If it takes more energy to refute bullshit than the energy used to create it, it gets frustrating, fast. Brandolini's Law[0] applies here. > Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
- scatterhead 4y ago
  This may be true, but it doesn't explain the problem. If there's a bigger problem with bullshit today than in the past (and the article certainly does zero work to convince us of this), it's not because it takes too much effort to refute bullshit -- it's because there are no social consequences to being marked a bullshitter.
throwaway14356 4y ago
I liked how Gary Stevenson put it. To crudely reproduce: He said that if he walked into a bank he would get a job instantly earning millions based on his accomplishments. An employer would bother to check his background and figure out what he is worth. They have to. Meanwhile news outlets hire economists who are clueless and without accomplishment to speak to the masses as if some authority on the subject.
- scatterhead 4y ago
  I prefer it more concisely: It's all about incentives.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
People clearly prefer to elect a confident liar over a boring competent politician. There is a strong cultural maybe species bias towards confidence nonsense especially when it fits our existing world view.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >maybe species bias I would go with species bias. Strongmen and bullshitters have risen up in every age and caused general issues with humanity when it turns out that 'making shit up' only goes so far before cold hand of reality slaps you down. It doesn't help that while physical laws are stable and universal, they are built on models of randomness and probabilities that don't give humans the comfort of 'a sure thing'.
protastus 4y ago
The author touches on media companies having a perverse set of incentives. This seems to me as a space ripe for disruption, that the dinosaurs have failed to capitalize on. Newspapers are dying a slow death, and that's very dangerous for democracy. For example, r/askscience offers a solution through moderation. Have a panel of known experts who review, comment and possibly even veto all topics of the day. Journalists rarely are experts, so pair them with consultants who have been vetted by the company. Today, the counterpoints to bullshit are at best buried inside the article in the form of a quote, and that's not strong enough to offset a false headline.
nomendos 4y ago
[flagged]
Nomentatus 4y ago
The US etc has passed through a few cycles of media control/moderation vs media anarchy; first with print, then radio, then TV - now youtube which is now trying to be restrictive atm but has a sordid rabbit-hole past. If you grew up when I did, with one middle-of-the-road newspaper in a medium-size city delivered each day and read through; plus highly regulated/filtered TV news (and other content) then right now seems like an age of bullshit. Go back to the age of radio madness (Father Coughlin and many, many more like him) and the yellow press and you realize this isn't peak manure (although yes there's more of everything, meaning more good and bad information.) But the well-moderated times have a price too: lots of stories that didn't fit the official narrative went unreported including the nature of native residential schools, nuclear mishaps, and much more.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lizardactivist 4y ago
Cultural problem.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HellDunkel 4y ago
The media we consume is a big problem. It defines the rules of the bullshitting game. Take reality tv and trump. Truth or wisedom are simply not in demand here. Come up with something outrageously stupid, mean or dumb and attention will be granted.
sorokod 4y ago
The obligatory monorail song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM
TacticalCoder 4y ago
This article itelf is complete bullshit. They're obviously totally anti-Musk and paint him next to ponzi-boy and 10-years-in-jail-Holmes. The intellectual dishonesty is high on this one. And then: > But it turned out that Bankman-Fried had essentially gambled away customers’ deposits at his company, leaving the customers in the lurch and destroying Bankman-Fried’s fortune virtually overnight. That is not at all what the indictment is about. It would be nice if the media stopped trying to bullshit us into believing that. Alameda was a scam from way before FTX was even created. The leaflet selling Alameda to investors were already using fake return figures. There are counts of conspiracy to defrauds customers and investors alike. The "effective altruism" guru (the Oxford professor who bought a $15m mansion with stolen money) was actually involved at FTX. It's not clear at all he's clean. Real altruistic people don't need to posture as altruistic people. They don't need to run cults. They don't need to scam people. They don't need to pose as "holier than thou" people. And they certainly don't buy $15m mansions with stolen money. What about, instead of spitting on Elon Musk, we get some actual investigative journalism? For example I've got an interesting subject to investigate: the exact role of SBF's guru who frequented the Bahamas and is running an "Effective Altruism" movement from a $15m mansion bought with stolen money? And, please, journalists... No bullshit in this age.
lanamo 4y ago
We have three levels of "bullshit": 1. The liar: The insidious lie fulfills this criterion, because the liar wants to deceive and is sure of success. 2. The bullshitter: thinks "What I'm saying could be wrong? So what?" 3. The idiot: thinks, however, "What I say could also be wrong? It'll be true!" The idiot just talks like that, or he heard something and passed it on unchecked. In digital media, bullshitters and idiots - as opposed to liars - are both perpetrators and victims. All three (liars, bullshitters, idiots) sometimes accidentally tell the truth. But because it is always easier to miss the truth than to meet it, in most cases they increase bullshit of all kinds and thus act at the expense of the truth. Bullshit only spreads on the internet if many people forward it. If we were all attentive, critical and informed, then this phenomenon would not exist. source(book): [ Philipp Hübl ] "Bullshit-Resistenz", 2018

73 points by robtherobber 4y ago

mdp2021 4y ago

A recommended read, mostly for awareness. Two notes: -- it is argued that "bullshitting is not lying, as the true/false state remains unknown to the actor because considered irrelevant": well, no, it is still substantially lying, as a disregard for truth. And I am not even checking philology, as I would normally do before discussing meanings: this is not a matter about the meaning of 'true' or 'lie', but substantial ethics. -- it is noted that we do not have enough "bullshit checkers". Now that is not the node: the node remains culture, intelligence, education, for many reasons; one of them is that "truth content" is not trivial and cannot be checked by anyone and cheaply and decisively. Boosting the fundamentals limits the undesirable phenomenon and more; just fighting the undesirable phenomenon will not guarantee "a step forwards" and will not be "a step above".

skybrian 4y ago
As can be seen in any online forum, being somewhat indifferent to knowing the facts is normal in ordinary conversation. This is how rumor, gossip, and speculation work. If you're going to call that lying, most people are lying most of the time. It's only in some formal writing that you go out of your way to check everything.
- watwut 4y ago
  It is still lying. Most people when they talk, they are not trying to bullshit. They may be wrong, but they are not indifferent to the notion of truth.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > indifferent to knowing the facts is normal in ordinary conversation ...With that one is brought back to philology: that would be "normal" "descriptively, or according to frequency", but not "prescriptively, or according to norm" :) > If you're going to call that lying Not just me, I grant you, but a long tradition. Yes, not holding truth as a "ground condition" is regarded as lying (i.e. further distinctions have little matter). > rumor, gossip, and speculation Not in context. Reporting rumors, in the form of "Some say X" or "Some say X under conditions C", is a normal statement with T/F values. A "gossipper" ("godsibling", "acquired relative") reports rumors about an "inner circle" and falls in the other case. Speculation works through hypoteticals, which in the form "There are grounds to state that if A then probably B" is again a normal statement with T/F (and TF/~T~F) values.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    A gossiper reports rumors without doing any checking for accuracy. That seems rather indifferent to the truth? Phrasing it as a technically true statement by adding “some say” in front is still rather indifferent to the truth of the rumor, as normally understood. Similarly, statements of the form “if X were true then Y would be true” are independent of the actual truth value of X, which is often unknown. If you care whether X is true or not, it’s entirely unhelpful. It’s indifferent to the truth of X because it’s an independent statement. These can be seen as forms of bullshitting that avoids being technically incorrect. It’s sort of like we’re doing now. We’re not discussing the ground truth of anything concrete.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      You seem to be referring to linguistic contexts in which the purpose is not aletic (or in the direction of aletic) but emotional (etc). (For what the hypotetical are concerned, they are T/F statements... They do not access a truth in the set of instanced facts, but one in the logical realm - still not BSing.) The dimensions can be relatively independent - so you could plot the instances on a Cartesian graph, one axis describing the "adherence to Truth", the other other practical intents. You may be comforting, you may be selling, etc.: you can do all of that without lying. Here we are discussing: it is not impossible that somebody came just to pass the time (purpose), with utter disregard to any truth, and that may facilitate drifting towards bullshitting - but it a more fitting idea to regard exchangers as investigators over some matter, which is still an aletic activity, and the opposite of BSing.
pixl97 4y ago
>one of them is that "truth content" is not trivial and cannot be checked by anyone and cheaply and decisively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

mountaintimefrm 4y ago

Since 2011 I've been calling it megalobamboozlementarianism.

mythhouse 4y ago

I read the whole article expecting to read how this 'age' is particularly prone to bullshitting vs other ages, but didn't see anything. Or perhaps the author is one such bullshiter himself making a point with clickbait bullshit.

jonahbenton 4y ago

FWIW, a moment's reflection suggests this is not new. The dawn of the "modern era" in the west is attributed to the rise of Jesus, and, forgive me but what are the various stories of Jesus other than total ridiculous bullshit- reincarnation, "immaculate conception", all the other nonsense- intended to build and maintain the social and financial control structures that existed at the time? I have not studied concrete instances of bullshit in the middle ages but the post-Enlightenment (a bullshit term if ever there was one) was riddled with bullshit. And then the late 1800s in the US featured "snake oil salesman" and "wildcat banking"- these sales pitches are literally indistinguishable from those described in the article. Technology changes the diffusion rate and potentially the effectiveness of the art of the bullshitter (debatable) but the art itself is ancient.

jfengel 4y ago
I think the key is that everybody expected that technology would decrease the effectiveness of bullshitting. Local bullshitting relies on there being nobody in the room to say "BS" -- or at least, a small enough number that wishful thinking could dominate. And the bullshitter knew that their time was limited before somebody called them out. The truth-tellers were expected to have an advantage: once the truth was seen, most people would recognize and accept it. The bullshitter's advantage was the slow speed of information diffusion. Turns out that is wrong. People are regularly given definitive rejections of bullshit, and they deny them. It's not that they haven't seen it, but that they choose to accept the bullshitter's reality. We always expected to be able to fool some of the people all of the time... but we assumed that "some" was a number in the single-digit percentages, not a majority or near majority of the (connected, first) world. I still don't know what to make of it. I'm pretty glum, to be honest. And I believe that's a lot of the point. I think that a lot of people choose to accept bullshit precisely because they think it hurts people they don't like. They may even grasp that it's false, but simply don't care. The negative consequences to them are sufficiently far off as to be dismissed, but the upside of having people angry at them is immediate.
- Atheros 4y ago
  I think that you are severely overestimating the number of people who believe the political bullshit. A much simpler explanation is that the vast majority are simply lying about believing it. How would American right-wing voters behave if they actually believed that the election was stolen? They would boycott voting and they would do it loudly. But they don't actually believe it. There is a word for this type of lie: vranyo. Lying about believing that Trump will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it distracts you from addressing their actual motivations which they know are cruel and unjust.

humanistbot 4y ago

Bullshitting is a centuries-old phenomena, nothing unique about our age. Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" was a 1985 essay that got turned into a 2005 best selling book. Which itself restates a thesis by Mark Twain's 1880 "On the Decay of the Art of Lying."

Eumenes 4y ago

Reminds me of current HR departments and the thought leadership that surround them.

scatterhead 4y ago
Maybe tell us how?

jmugan 4y ago

It starts out strong, identifying bullshitters on the left and right, but if Obama and Pinker are bullshitters, I'm not sure the label has much meaning. Which is a shame, because I too have been surprised at how little the truth seems to mean to people.

karaterobot 4y ago
He conflates world class bullshitters with people who just speak off the cuff about things they don't know much about, or people who make predictions that turn out to be wrong, or even just people with whom he disagrees, but who are generally pretty earnest in their beliefs, right or wrong. These aren't the same, and it muddies the waters. I agree that the most extreme cases of post-truth celebrity liars, while perhaps not a new phenomenon, may be parts, symptoms, or mechanisms of some new phenomenon that really deserves to be thoughtfully explored. But this article ain't that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Beltalowda 4y ago
The author's definition of bullshitter is "people I don't like". The Trump and Musk cases are fairly obvious, IMO. Even many of their proponents would agree both have a propensity for "bullshit" at times. Obama is already a bit more murky: I certainly share the author's disappointment in how the Obama presidency turned out, but it's not clear to me if he really was "bullshitting" or if he started out with genuine intentions and just overestimated the difficulties he would run in to – even if we assume Obama was bulshitting to some degree, the political difficulties he faced are no doubt a huge factor (I used to joke that the GOP could be replaced by an extremely advanced AI which consists of "if proposed_by('obama') then oppose() endif"). I haven't followed Pinker's more recent work very closely (I read two of his older books from the early 2000s), but the article that's linked to prove the point (by the same author) does not make a convincing case. Maybe he can come off as a bit arrogant at times, which is a fair enough criticism, but that does not make one a "bullshitter". He cites “Many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one.” as the first example of "utterly irrational swipes at those to the left of him"? Seriously? My feelings about some of the other citation are a bit more mixed, but none of them seem "bullshitting" to me: just a guy voicing his opinion that you may or may not agree with in a way that you may or may not like. In short, this is the umpteenth attempt to make "I don't like it" somehow sound more authoritative. Which sounds like ... ehm, bulshitting to me.

gravitate 4y ago

Refuting bullshit is a pain. If it takes more energy to refute bullshit than the energy used to create it, it gets frustrating, fast. Brandolini's Law[0] applies here. > Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

scatterhead 4y ago
This may be true, but it doesn't explain the problem. If there's a bigger problem with bullshit today than in the past (and the article certainly does zero work to convince us of this), it's not because it takes too much effort to refute bullshit -- it's because there are no social consequences to being marked a bullshitter.

throwaway14356 4y ago

I liked how Gary Stevenson put it. To crudely reproduce: He said that if he walked into a bank he would get a job instantly earning millions based on his accomplishments. An employer would bother to check his background and figure out what he is worth. They have to. Meanwhile news outlets hire economists who are clueless and without accomplishment to speak to the masses as if some authority on the subject.

scatterhead 4y ago
I prefer it more concisely: It's all about incentives.

PaulKeeble 4y ago

People clearly prefer to elect a confident liar over a boring competent politician. There is a strong cultural maybe species bias towards confidence nonsense especially when it fits our existing world view.

pixl97 4y ago
>maybe species bias I would go with species bias. Strongmen and bullshitters have risen up in every age and caused general issues with humanity when it turns out that 'making shit up' only goes so far before cold hand of reality slaps you down. It doesn't help that while physical laws are stable and universal, they are built on models of randomness and probabilities that don't give humans the comfort of 'a sure thing'.

protastus 4y ago

The author touches on media companies having a perverse set of incentives. This seems to me as a space ripe for disruption, that the dinosaurs have failed to capitalize on. Newspapers are dying a slow death, and that's very dangerous for democracy. For example, r/askscience offers a solution through moderation. Have a panel of known experts who review, comment and possibly even veto all topics of the day. Journalists rarely are experts, so pair them with consultants who have been vetted by the company. Today, the counterpoints to bullshit are at best buried inside the article in the form of a quote, and that's not strong enough to offset a false headline.

nomendos 4y ago

[flagged]

Nomentatus 4y ago

The US etc has passed through a few cycles of media control/moderation vs media anarchy; first with print, then radio, then TV - now youtube which is now trying to be restrictive atm but has a sordid rabbit-hole past. If you grew up when I did, with one middle-of-the-road newspaper in a medium-size city delivered each day and read through; plus highly regulated/filtered TV news (and other content) then right now seems like an age of bullshit. Go back to the age of radio madness (Father Coughlin and many, many more like him) and the yellow press and you realize this isn't peak manure (although yes there's more of everything, meaning more good and bad information.) But the well-moderated times have a price too: lots of stories that didn't fit the official narrative went unreported including the nature of native residential schools, nuclear mishaps, and much more.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lizardactivist 4y ago

Cultural problem.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

HellDunkel 4y ago

The media we consume is a big problem. It defines the rules of the bullshitting game. Take reality tv and trump. Truth or wisedom are simply not in demand here. Come up with something outrageously stupid, mean or dumb and attention will be granted.

sorokod 4y ago

The obligatory monorail song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM

TacticalCoder 4y ago

This article itelf is complete bullshit. They're obviously totally anti-Musk and paint him next to ponzi-boy and 10-years-in-jail-Holmes. The intellectual dishonesty is high on this one. And then: > But it turned out that Bankman-Fried had essentially gambled away customers’ deposits at his company, leaving the customers in the lurch and destroying Bankman-Fried’s fortune virtually overnight. That is not at all what the indictment is about. It would be nice if the media stopped trying to bullshit us into believing that. Alameda was a scam from way before FTX was even created. The leaflet selling Alameda to investors were already using fake return figures. There are counts of conspiracy to defrauds customers and investors alike. The "effective altruism" guru (the Oxford professor who bought a $15m mansion with stolen money) was actually involved at FTX. It's not clear at all he's clean. Real altruistic people don't need to posture as altruistic people. They don't need to run cults. They don't need to scam people. They don't need to pose as "holier than thou" people. And they certainly don't buy $15m mansions with stolen money. What about, instead of spitting on Elon Musk, we get some actual investigative journalism? For example I've got an interesting subject to investigate: the exact role of SBF's guru who frequented the Bahamas and is running an "Effective Altruism" movement from a $15m mansion bought with stolen money? And, please, journalists... No bullshit in this age.

lanamo 4y ago

We have three levels of "bullshit": 1. The liar: The insidious lie fulfills this criterion, because the liar wants to deceive and is sure of success. 2. The bullshitter: thinks "What I'm saying could be wrong? So what?" 3. The idiot: thinks, however, "What I say could also be wrong? It'll be true!" The idiot just talks like that, or he heard something and passed it on unchecked. In digital media, bullshitters and idiots - as opposed to liars - are both perpetrators and victims. All three (liars, bullshitters, idiots) sometimes accidentally tell the truth. But because it is always easier to miss the truth than to meet it, in most cases they increase bullshit of all kinds and thus act at the expense of the truth. Bullshit only spreads on the internet if many people forward it. If we were all attentive, critical and informed, then this phenomenon would not exist. source(book): [ Philipp Hübl ] "Bullshit-Resistenz", 2018