Posted by
gepr on
Mar 02, 2016; 6:17pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Unbearable-Asymmetry-of-Bullshit-Quillette-tp7587214p7587216.html
On 03/02/2016 09:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/"When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks." -- Earp
"In On Bullshit, the philosopher Frankfurt (2005) defines bullshit as something that is designed to impress but that was constructed absent direct concern for the truth. This distinguishes bullshit from lying, which entails a deliberate manipulation and subversion of truth (as understood by the liar)." -- Pennycook et al 2015
I think there's a drastic (but perhaps subtle to some) difference between these two conceptions of bullsh!t. And as much as I don't really like the Pennycook et al paper, I agree more with their definition than Earp's.
But the more important point is this idea that the energy required to refute bullsh!t is somehow a waste ... or wrong, lamentable ... or somesuch. Earp is guilty of the precise fallacy of which he accuses others, building a straw man named Voldemort, then pelting it with self-righteous insults and indignation. What's that? A 1,720 word article full of bias and myopia?!? How much effort would it take to argue with Earp's bullsh!t? ... to see beneath the truth-like veneer he props up?
The trick is that such energy use/waste _is_ science. Earp and those like him miss the point entirely. They yap on and on, laying out endless bullsh!t about _the_ truth, what they see as the end product of our energy, and they call those end products "science". They're so wrong, and they pollute the air so completely with their wrongness, that it is very difficult to refute them.
In the end, though, you can't think of people like Earp as _bad_ people. They're just magical thinkers. They believe in unicorns and rainbows and wonder why we can't just skip to the _end_. Earp already knows the truth, knows reality, and wonders why we have to spend so much time and effort slogging through the actual science.
--
⇔ glen
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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen