6 ms·

Bullshit

49 points by 6cxs2hd6 12y ago

Aoyagi 12y ago
>Advertising, Public relations, Political propaganda, Education, Love, sex and romance, News media, Technology, Business, Art, Medicine Not religion? Aww...
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. Is religion not the only place where bullshit is acceptable, nay .. even required .. and that people know that before they get involved in one?
  - Aoyagi 12y ago
    Yeah, it's bullshit by design, so I guess there is not a lot to talk about. Oh well.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. I'd rather strongly disagree with that. Because it appeals to a form of justification which makes verifiability in any decisive sense largely impossible, it is a fertile venue for "bullshit" (in the terms used in the article) -- and for the same reason, for "liars", which the article distinguishes -- but it is not, either in principle or in practice, either exclusively bullshit nor "for bullshits sake". The purposes of bullshitting, lying, or truth-telling in religion are pretty much the same as they are in any other venue.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      I think the point is that once a religion stops being bullshit, it becomes a science.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        That simply doesn't work with the definitions in the article. If you are using BS to mean anything that's not taking an exclusively empirical approach to explore exclusively questions of objective fact -- which its pretty clear that some people do -- then, sure, that's tautologically true. But that's a completely different definition than is used in the article, so its not relevant. Both truth telling and lying (both of which the article distinguishes from BS), as defined in the article, are quite possible in domains where the questions aren't subject to scientific exploration. Whether those domains are meaningful is a philosophical question orthogonal to the truth/lie/BS distinction that the article makes, though.
  - h1kar3 12y ago
    I guess many people have different perspectives.
- zorbo 12y ago
  I don't consider what happens in religion bullshit as defined by the article. I think this sums it up pretty well: > The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. Especially that last sentence is relevant. I may personally consider most of religion to be nonsense or untrue, but its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). Bullshit - again, as defined by the article - goes beyond that. It doesn't have to be true or false. It's just.. bullshit. The infamous "leverage synergy" phrase comes to mind. It doesn't even mean anything.
  - pdonis 12y ago
    > its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). The same could be said of other areas mentioned in the list in the post you were responding to. The point appears to be not that the entire field is bullshit, but that one can find examples of bullshit in the field. I would even add science to the list if that's the criterion; one can find examples of bullshit in science as well. If, OTOH, the point was to give fields that appear to be primarily bullshit, I would not have put education, love, sex and romance, technology, business, art, and medicine on the list. (Or science.)
- autokad 12y ago
  some people in religion are bullshitters, some are liars, and some are truth tellers. the real bullshit comes in with people like you who pretend your preaching the truth but you really know nothing about it. your just a bullshitter. see, if you truly believed in science, which could be coined as the pursuit of truth, you'd simply stick to saying some elements of a religion are true, some are false, and some if not many cannot be known/discovered. you'd probably sit there and complain if someone said something that blanketed an entire topic, while you do the same to religion. and i would guess you'd probably call yourself scientific. again, i think this is the epitome of bullshit.
  - bradleysmith 12y ago
    I'd say Aoyagi was really just expressing disdain for not including religion on the list. Saying he/she was 'preaching the truth' seems a bit far-fetched. He/she asked a question about something not being included: "not religion?", and expressed vague dislike (in an obviously subjective way): "awww" He/she didn't really make any statements of what truth is. Only what his/her opinion of a missing element of the article was. He/she did set off a heap of reactions though, which is interesting to me. I've noticed how much more religion-friendly, or at least religion-neutral HN has become over the past year. That is a positive thing, in my opinion.
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    Of a particularly relevant note here is agnosticism [1], or the viewpoint that there are certain things that are simply unknowable to humans. The implication being that humans can neither confirm NOR deny the truth value of the statements. Metaphysical statements often fall into this category. And hence, you can also have agnostic theists [2] and agnostic atheists [3], who both recognize that they are taking a stance on an unknowable truth value. Some would then define this as the very essence of the word faith, but I would like to at least point out that both sides are subject to the same definition. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism
- claar 12y ago
  Here we go. In the last year since moving here from Slashdot/Reddit, I've seen such a more sophisticated and thoughtful community. Thanks for proving that mindless unkind criticisms of misunderstood communities is alive and well at HN as well.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
RobAley 12y ago
Any reason why the title here is censored? It's spelled out in full on the linked page. Anyone who knows what the word means and is shocked by it will surely still be shocked even with the * in. I've never understood what partial censoring, intentionally done so that people can still read the thing, achieves. EDIT -> Ah, the title has been edited now, it did say "bullsh*t". It's probably a good example of how to derail a potential useful submission by focusing on the wrong details when creating a title.
raldi 12y ago
Why is "bullsh*t" considered less objectionable than "bullshit"?
- gregd 12y ago
  I never understood this type of logic. We all say "bullshit" when we read the title, not "bullshstart" or "bullshasteriskt". They're just f*cking words...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mreiland 12y ago
    I dislike fasterisking.
- 6cxs2hd6 12y ago
  As to why I submitted that way: I couldn't recall the norms here. I figured a mod could always un-G-rate the title (as they did). Plus, I felt a little uncomfortable because the title "Bullshit" could seem link-baity (although the content is worthwhile) so I felt better submitting it "toned down". Those are my stated reasons. Of course you may call bullshit.
badman_ting 12y ago
Yeah, Penn & Teller started out debunking psychics and so on -- then they decided gun control and recycling are bullshit too. I think one needs to be very careful about this business of "cutting through the bullshit" or whatever. It's easy to turn it into a self-righteous way of talking about whatever you disagree with. You're not just disagreeing, you're scoring a victory for the truth in a world full of crap, etc., etc. Also, it does nothing to analyze why certain social fictions are propagated and continue to function even if no one believes in them. You can just content yourself with thinking everyone is full of shit and stop thinking there.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I'm interested in their conclusions that gun-control and recycling are bullshit. Was this a political thing for them, that they don't support these behaviors politically and so concluded after "examining" the resulting effects that behaving in this way (controlling guns or recycling) don't have the claimed effects?
  - badman_ting 12y ago
    Yes, basically. It's ok to call the woo-woo stuff bullshit, I don't care about alien abductions and crystals. But to take that and then apply it to gun control and so-called "environmental hysteria" (their phrase) is no good, I say. I mean, shit, they called the episode "environmental hysteria" and they pulled the old "dihydrogen monoxide" thing. In so many words: We found some dumb people that care about the environment, therefore if you care about the environment you're dumb.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    I haven't watched the show in a long time (is it still on air?) but based on what I remember a rhetorical technique used was to cherry pick who they used as experts to advance different sides of the argument. If I remember rightly they did something on environmentalism where they mostly interviewed unwashed hippies rather than environmental scientists.
  - mistermann 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 12y ago
That's pretty much exactly how Neal Strphenson defines "bulshytt" in Anathem...
lhnz 12y ago
A lot of what people call bullshit is necessary social grease/grace [0]. Trust and authority are currently centralised and because this is the case if you want to belong to society you will have to become more forgiving of bullshit. Additionally I haven't met a single person yet (and I include myself in this wonderful category) that doesn't believe their own bullshit. Whenever I hear somebody imply that they're always correct and never believe or act upon anything that can be empirically disproven I call bullshit at that or wonder whether they've ever risked believing and acting upon anything at all? If you truly despise bullshit then do this: before you point the finger at others realise that you're likely one of them, and that if you really want to lessen it your best chance will be to start with yourself. This is called humility. How might you do this? Well perhaps before or after you say something, you can turn to others and ask them what they truly think without imposing expectations or qualifications that they must agree with you. And remember even if they respond saying "yes, that sounds right" you could still be wrong and trust me here you will eventually be wrong. You are only human. If the cognitive dissonance of knowing that you will never be a perfectly rational being is too much for you, then continue believing whatever you want about your intellect and others quackery as the world will not stop you. I guess we all need our egos [1]. * * * [0] Firstly, I define bullshit as the action of using higher social skills to offset lower domain knowledge. Secondly, my intuition is that belief in bullshit also stabilises large groups: I would be just as worried about a lack of bullshit as I would harm caused by bullshit. [1] Our need to politicise and attack the bullshit of somebody with higher status shows our wish to have the injustice of not being the dominant re-evaluated by our group, while our need to attack the bullshit of those with lower status is a strategy to fight off perceived pretenders of our position. Resentment and contempt are after all two sides of the same coin, both used when we don't want to personally act on our feelings.
- voteapathy 12y ago
  Oddly enough, On Bullshit is itself bullshit. Half of the essay is just a line by line elaboration of Oxford English Dictionary definitions.
mcguire 12y ago
Many of the example links in the article go to The Onion. (And there's Thank You For Smoking.) Is the author trying to imply that irony, sarcasm, and satire are bullshit?
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
2500 years later, and we still have Socrates fighting the Sophists. I'd be very careful with definitions here. Because many human endeavors can be observed and described from many different angles, the wisest course of action many times may be to emotionally disengage and describe one or many of the sides without caring about a discussion of universal truth. This does not make one a bullshitter, although by this definition it does.

49 points by 6cxs2hd6 12y ago

>Advertising, Public relations, Political propaganda, Education, Love, sex and romance, News media, Technology, Business, Art, Medicine Not religion? Aww...

fit2rule 12y ago
Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. Is religion not the only place where bullshit is acceptable, nay .. even required .. and that people know that before they get involved in one?
- Aoyagi 12y ago
  Yeah, it's bullshit by design, so I guess there is not a lot to talk about. Oh well.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake. I'd rather strongly disagree with that. Because it appeals to a form of justification which makes verifiability in any decisive sense largely impossible, it is a fertile venue for "bullshit" (in the terms used in the article) -- and for the same reason, for "liars", which the article distinguishes -- but it is not, either in principle or in practice, either exclusively bullshit nor "for bullshits sake". The purposes of bullshitting, lying, or truth-telling in religion are pretty much the same as they are in any other venue.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    I think the point is that once a religion stops being bullshit, it becomes a science.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      That simply doesn't work with the definitions in the article. If you are using BS to mean anything that's not taking an exclusively empirical approach to explore exclusively questions of objective fact -- which its pretty clear that some people do -- then, sure, that's tautologically true. But that's a completely different definition than is used in the article, so its not relevant. Both truth telling and lying (both of which the article distinguishes from BS), as defined in the article, are quite possible in domains where the questions aren't subject to scientific exploration. Whether those domains are meaningful is a philosophical question orthogonal to the truth/lie/BS distinction that the article makes, though.
- h1kar3 12y ago
  I guess many people have different perspectives.
zorbo 12y ago
I don't consider what happens in religion bullshit as defined by the article. I think this sums it up pretty well: > The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. Especially that last sentence is relevant. I may personally consider most of religion to be nonsense or untrue, but its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). Bullshit - again, as defined by the article - goes beyond that. It doesn't have to be true or false. It's just.. bullshit. The infamous "leverage synergy" phrase comes to mind. It doesn't even mean anything.
- pdonis 12y ago
  > its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). The same could be said of other areas mentioned in the list in the post you were responding to. The point appears to be not that the entire field is bullshit, but that one can find examples of bullshit in the field. I would even add science to the list if that's the criterion; one can find examples of bullshit in science as well. If, OTOH, the point was to give fields that appear to be primarily bullshit, I would not have put education, love, sex and romance, technology, business, art, and medicine on the list. (Or science.)
autokad 12y ago
some people in religion are bullshitters, some are liars, and some are truth tellers. the real bullshit comes in with people like you who pretend your preaching the truth but you really know nothing about it. your just a bullshitter. see, if you truly believed in science, which could be coined as the pursuit of truth, you'd simply stick to saying some elements of a religion are true, some are false, and some if not many cannot be known/discovered. you'd probably sit there and complain if someone said something that blanketed an entire topic, while you do the same to religion. and i would guess you'd probably call yourself scientific. again, i think this is the epitome of bullshit.
- bradleysmith 12y ago
  I'd say Aoyagi was really just expressing disdain for not including religion on the list. Saying he/she was 'preaching the truth' seems a bit far-fetched. He/she asked a question about something not being included: "not religion?", and expressed vague dislike (in an obviously subjective way): "awww" He/she didn't really make any statements of what truth is. Only what his/her opinion of a missing element of the article was. He/she did set off a heap of reactions though, which is interesting to me. I've noticed how much more religion-friendly, or at least religion-neutral HN has become over the past year. That is a positive thing, in my opinion.
- jdmichal 12y ago
  Of a particularly relevant note here is agnosticism [1], or the viewpoint that there are certain things that are simply unknowable to humans. The implication being that humans can neither confirm NOR deny the truth value of the statements. Metaphysical statements often fall into this category. And hence, you can also have agnostic theists [2] and agnostic atheists [3], who both recognize that they are taking a stance on an unknowable truth value. Some would then define this as the very essence of the word faith, but I would like to at least point out that both sides are subject to the same definition. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theism [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism
claar 12y ago
Here we go. In the last year since moving here from Slashdot/Reddit, I've seen such a more sophisticated and thoughtful community. Thanks for proving that mindless unkind criticisms of misunderstood communities is alive and well at HN as well.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

RobAley 12y ago

Any reason why the title here is censored? It's spelled out in full on the linked page. Anyone who knows what the word means and is shocked by it will surely still be shocked even with the * in. I've never understood what partial censoring, intentionally done so that people can still read the thing, achieves. EDIT -> Ah, the title has been edited now, it did say "bullsh*t". It's probably a good example of how to derail a potential useful submission by focusing on the wrong details when creating a title.

raldi 12y ago

Why is "bullsh*t" considered less objectionable than "bullshit"?

gregd 12y ago
I never understood this type of logic. We all say "bullshit" when we read the title, not "bullshstart" or "bullshasteriskt". They're just f*cking words...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mreiland 12y ago
  I dislike fasterisking.
6cxs2hd6 12y ago
As to why I submitted that way: I couldn't recall the norms here. I figured a mod could always un-G-rate the title (as they did). Plus, I felt a little uncomfortable because the title "Bullshit" could seem link-baity (although the content is worthwhile) so I felt better submitting it "toned down". Those are my stated reasons. Of course you may call bullshit.

badman_ting 12y ago

Yeah, Penn & Teller started out debunking psychics and so on -- then they decided gun control and recycling are bullshit too. I think one needs to be very careful about this business of "cutting through the bullshit" or whatever. It's easy to turn it into a self-righteous way of talking about whatever you disagree with. You're not just disagreeing, you're scoring a victory for the truth in a world full of crap, etc., etc. Also, it does nothing to analyze why certain social fictions are propagated and continue to function even if no one believes in them. You can just content yourself with thinking everyone is full of shit and stop thinking there.

wavefunction 12y ago
I'm interested in their conclusions that gun-control and recycling are bullshit. Was this a political thing for them, that they don't support these behaviors politically and so concluded after "examining" the resulting effects that behaving in this way (controlling guns or recycling) don't have the claimed effects?
- badman_ting 12y ago
  Yes, basically. It's ok to call the woo-woo stuff bullshit, I don't care about alien abductions and crystals. But to take that and then apply it to gun control and so-called "environmental hysteria" (their phrase) is no good, I say. I mean, shit, they called the episode "environmental hysteria" and they pulled the old "dihydrogen monoxide" thing. In so many words: We found some dumb people that care about the environment, therefore if you care about the environment you're dumb.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I haven't watched the show in a long time (is it still on air?) but based on what I remember a rhetorical technique used was to cherry pick who they used as experts to advance different sides of the argument. If I remember rightly they did something on environmentalism where they mostly interviewed unwashed hippies rather than environmental scientists.
- mistermann 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 12y ago

That's pretty much exactly how Neal Strphenson defines "bulshytt" in Anathem...

lhnz 12y ago

A lot of what people call bullshit is necessary social grease/grace [0]. Trust and authority are currently centralised and because this is the case if you want to belong to society you will have to become more forgiving of bullshit. Additionally I haven't met a single person yet (and I include myself in this wonderful category) that doesn't believe their own bullshit. Whenever I hear somebody imply that they're always correct and never believe or act upon anything that can be empirically disproven I call bullshit at that or wonder whether they've ever risked believing and acting upon anything at all? If you truly despise bullshit then do this: before you point the finger at others realise that you're likely one of them, and that if you really want to lessen it your best chance will be to start with yourself. This is called humility. How might you do this? Well perhaps before or after you say something, you can turn to others and ask them what they truly think without imposing expectations or qualifications that they must agree with you. And remember even if they respond saying "yes, that sounds right" you could still be wrong and trust me here you will eventually be wrong. You are only human. If the cognitive dissonance of knowing that you will never be a perfectly rational being is too much for you, then continue believing whatever you want about your intellect and others quackery as the world will not stop you. I guess we all need our egos [1]. * * * [0] Firstly, I define bullshit as the action of using higher social skills to offset lower domain knowledge. Secondly, my intuition is that belief in bullshit also stabilises large groups: I would be just as worried about a lack of bullshit as I would harm caused by bullshit. [1] Our need to politicise and attack the bullshit of somebody with higher status shows our wish to have the injustice of not being the dominant re-evaluated by our group, while our need to attack the bullshit of those with lower status is a strategy to fight off perceived pretenders of our position. Resentment and contempt are after all two sides of the same coin, both used when we don't want to personally act on our feelings.

voteapathy 12y ago
Oddly enough, On Bullshit is itself bullshit. Half of the essay is just a line by line elaboration of Oxford English Dictionary definitions.

mcguire 12y ago

Many of the example links in the article go to The Onion. (And there's Thank You For Smoking.) Is the author trying to imply that irony, sarcasm, and satire are bullshit?

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

2500 years later, and we still have Socrates fighting the Sophists. I'd be very careful with definitions here. Because many human endeavors can be observed and described from many different angles, the wisest course of action many times may be to emotionally disengage and describe one or many of the sides without caring about a discussion of universal truth. This does not make one a bullshitter, although by this definition it does.