I read today another article about bullshit. This time it’s about the bullshit web. I’ve been saving things related to bullshit for the past couple years and the list is getting long, so maybe here I’ll put together a bullshit list. Articles that deal with the topic of bullshit.
Bullshit on the web.
The web is somehow feels slower today than it did 15 years ago. Seems like an insane statement given the rate at which bandwidth has increased, but it’s true. I have a very extensive set of ad blockers and privacy plugins that have shielded me from a lot of the bullshit of unprotected web browsing, but every time I sit down at one of my schools lab computers, or on my wifes computer, and experience the raw web, it’s just jaw droppingly bad. Pop-ups, popovers, tips, accept buttons.
But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.
and
“These practices are killing the web, and I don’t know if the companies involved have realized that,” said web developer Peter Gasston. “The major problem is that they negatively affect the loading time of a page, and there’s good data showing that users will abandon pages if they don’t load in just a few seconds. Poor page loading also has two other major effects. The first is that teens and young people don’t like to share links anymore as they know the targets will be filled with ads; so instead they share screenshots. This stops the site from receiving any further traffic. Second, it drives people to install ad blockers.”
Bullshit in politics.
Much of what I read from people who oppose Trump attempts to counter his rhetoric with facts. That hasn’t worked and is not going to work. The truth is not the antidote for bullshit. So how do you defeat the bullshitter? This has been a genuine problem for his political opponents thus far. Frankfurt doesn’t offer any advice in the video (perhaps his book does?), and I’m at a loss as well, but I do know that factual refutation will not make any difference.
Trump isn’t lying, he’s bullshitting – and it’s far more dangerous
In addition to being unconcerned about the truth (which liars do care about, since they are trying to conceal it), Frankfurt suggests that bullshitters don’t really care whether their audience believes what they are saying. Indeed, getting the audience to believe something is false isn’t the goal of bullshitting. Rather, bullshitters say what they do in an effort to change how the audience sees them, “to convey a certain impression” of themselves.
In Trump’s case, much of his rhetoric and speech seems designed to inflate his own grand persona. Hence the tweets about improving the record sales of artists performing at his inauguration and his claims that he “alone can fix” the problems in the country.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/trump-isnt-lying-hes-bullshitting-and-its-far-more-dangerous/
A whole class on bullshit!
We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.
“On Bullshit” (the original essay)
For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it isphony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking thing
https://www5.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
Bullshit jobs:
Another major contributor has to be the need for the top power brokers in large firms to surround themselves with corporate retainers and aristocrats, who help shore up the top peoples’ power and thus their wages — maybe the market force at work is big salaries for the C-suite, the VPs, the top deans and other administrators whose retinues sprawl beyond all measure.
I like this theory best, because it explains why firms are so quick to cut real jobs (teachers, clerks, waiters, ticket-takers, and other people who interact with the public and do the business of the business) but so reluctant to trim the thick bureaucratic layer surmounting all. From the perspective of a VP hoping to get a raise, the company’s profitability (driven by a motivated, valued and robust workforce of non-bullshit workers) is secondary; the primary factor is beating all the other VPs. When asked to make cuts, any VP who erodes his retinue suffers hits to his bonus, while making cuts to useful workers may erode the firm’s profitability and cause it eventually crash and burn, but that will be someone else’s problem.
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/20/on-stage-tonight-in-la.html
https://aeon.co/videos/brand-consultant-pr-researcher-why-the-bullshit-jobs-era-needs-to-end
Peak Bullshit and “post-truth”
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. These are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispenably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
Cultivating a bullshit detector:
Adichie described her deep mortification at the mistake she made speaking to the male writer, and how, after the matter, she developed admiration for the “fantastic bullshit detector” of the writer’s wife. She told the graduates, “So have a good bullshit detector. If you don’t have it now, work on it.”
Bullshit in academia:
In most universities nowadays — and this seems to be true almost everywhere — academic staff find themselves spending less and less time studying, teaching, and writing about things, and more and more time measuring, assessing, discussing, and quantifying the way in which they study, teach, and write about things (or the way in which they propose to do so in the future. European universities, reportedly, now spend at least 1.4 billion euros [about 1.7 billion dollars] a year on failed grant applications.). It’s gotten to the point where “admin” now takes up so much of most professors’ time that complaining about it is the default mode of socializing among academic colleagues; indeed, insisting on talking instead about one’s latest research project or course idea is considered somewhat rude.
…
Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work — real work, here, defined not only as teaching and scholarship but also as actually useful administrative work in support of either. What’s more, it seems to me this is a direct effect of the death of the university, at least in its original medieval conception as a guild of self-organized scholars. Gayatri Spivak, a literary critic and university professor at Columbia, has observed that, in her student days, when people spoke of “the university,” it was assumed they were referring to the faculty. Nowadays it’s assumed they are referring to the administration. And this administration is increasingly modeling itself on corporate management.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318
Business schools:
(There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.)
Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school
Carl Sagan:
Like many a science communicator after him, Sagan was very much concerned with the influence of superstitious religious beliefs. He also foresaw a time in the near future much like our own. Elsewhere in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan writes of “America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of control over media and education renders people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”
This state involves, he says a “slide… back into superstition” of the religious variety and also a general “celebration of ignorance,” such that well-supported scientific theories carry the same weight or less than explanations made up on the spot by authorities whom people have lost the ability to “knowledgeably question.”
http://www.openculture.com/2018/03/carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit.html
The bullshit of “Design Thinking”
Design thinking marketing needs to stop enchanting industries with a diluted design process. The reduction of a complex creative problem-solving mindset into five steps makes design seem easy when it’s not. A certificate for the completion of a design thinking course is not enough to transform a business into the next Apple. So don’t be deceived by the demystification of the design process or the chance to workshop out million-dollar ideas over post-its. There’s more to design than what design thinking dealers are preaching.
https://www.core77.com/posts/68499/Natasha-Jens-Design-Thinking-is-Bullshit-Argument
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/natasha-jen-pentagram-graphicdesign-230218
Superhuman AI is bullshit too:
In contradistinction to this orthodoxy, I find the following five heresies to have more evidence to support them.
1. Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.
2. Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.3. Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.
4. Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.
5. Intelligences are only one factor in progress.
https://boingboing.net/2017/04/27/singularitarianism.html
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai
Visualization Bullshit:
Again, this is pure visual bullshit: meaning is obscured without adding any additional information, simply in order to impress the viewer.
https://callingbullshit.org/tools/tools_proportional_ink.html
A Guide to Being Less Wrong
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” -Albert Einstein
https://betterhumans.coach.me/bullshit-detector-a-guide-to-being-less-wrong-ce0bbbd1a41b
https://boingboing.net/2018/07/30/you-gonna-use-myspace.html
http://highexistence.com/7-spiritual-thoughts-ideas-total-bullshit/
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/5/7/17306008/global-warming-climate-change-scenarios-ambition