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.
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.
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.
There is "lying" which is apparently "betrayal", there is "bullshitting" for the nuance of cheap and vile, and then there is talking of things you do not know properly.
But this is an example of the already noted risk to have "overly quick" "bullshit identifiers" around, which may add further noise instead of progression.
-- 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
But this is an example of the already noted risk to have "overly quick" "bullshit identifiers" around, which may add further noise instead of progression.
Stories of deep psychological truth that transcend physical space and time. Just like all great religious stories.
Deleted Comment
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".
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."
It's only in some formal writing that you go out of your way to check everything.
...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.
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."
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
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.
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.