2 ms·

I agree it sounds like it should be true. But the reason BS is effective is that it often sounds true without actually being so. I can think of many examples wi

by nvm0n2 3y ago

I agree it sounds like it should be true. But the reason BS is effective is that it often sounds true without actually being so. I can think of many examples within 10 seconds where high effort bullshit was trivially refutable, so I don't think it's safe to assume that this non-"law" actually holds in reality regardless of how cozy it may feel.

nobodyandproud 3y ago
Sure, but the best BS is mostly true and requires fact-finding. We see this in science where it’s the lack of replication that uncovers the BS. We’ll agree to disagree, but I’m willing to assume this as a given to progress an argument.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  But I'm not willing, because your willingness to make unfounded assumptions leads you to demand things like censorship and the removal of all anonymity, which would only be possible at great cost and would certainly make it much harder to refute official, government sanctioned BS which is the most important kind. Hacker News is an especially good example of why it's important. This forum is full of people who both generate and accept vast quantities of "right sounding" BS all the time, just look at any discussion of COVID, climate, etc. All you'd do with your proposals is enable large-scale harassment and punishment of anyone pointing out that yes Virginia, it's actually quite likely that a novel coronavirus came from the lab right next to the first cases, the that was experimenting on novel coronaviruses. Instead of leading us towards insight and truth you'd have it that all such people are immediately silenced on the grounds of producing producing clever "BS" that's too hard to refute. As for science, I'm afraid that replication is usually not necessary to uncover a paper as BS. It's actually one of the things I was thinking of when I said high effort BS can often be trivially refuted. Scientists like to do a full replication anyway because within their culture that's considered respectable and lawsuit-proof, whereas pointing out that a paper is illogical, makes absurd assumptions and none of the numbers add up can land you in hot water. But in reality lots of high-effort scientific papers that took a team of authors months to produce can be refuted in five minutes by just pointing out things in the text. "How did this get through peer review?" is a very common response to studying bad scientific papers - you don't need a full blown replication to detect these problems.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

nobodyandproud 3y ago

Sure, but the best BS is mostly true and requires fact-finding. We see this in science where it’s the lack of replication that uncovers the BS. We’ll agree to disagree, but I’m willing to assume this as a given to progress an argument.

nvm0n2 3y ago
But I'm not willing, because your willingness to make unfounded assumptions leads you to demand things like censorship and the removal of all anonymity, which would only be possible at great cost and would certainly make it much harder to refute official, government sanctioned BS which is the most important kind. Hacker News is an especially good example of why it's important. This forum is full of people who both generate and accept vast quantities of "right sounding" BS all the time, just look at any discussion of COVID, climate, etc. All you'd do with your proposals is enable large-scale harassment and punishment of anyone pointing out that yes Virginia, it's actually quite likely that a novel coronavirus came from the lab right next to the first cases, the that was experimenting on novel coronaviruses. Instead of leading us towards insight and truth you'd have it that all such people are immediately silenced on the grounds of producing producing clever "BS" that's too hard to refute. As for science, I'm afraid that replication is usually not necessary to uncover a paper as BS. It's actually one of the things I was thinking of when I said high effort BS can often be trivially refuted. Scientists like to do a full replication anyway because within their culture that's considered respectable and lawsuit-proof, whereas pointing out that a paper is illogical, makes absurd assumptions and none of the numbers add up can land you in hot water. But in reality lots of high-effort scientific papers that took a team of authors months to produce can be refuted in five minutes by just pointing out things in the text. "How did this get through peer review?" is a very common response to studying bad scientific papers - you don't need a full blown replication to detect these problems.