Coming after my last post, which took aim at Vox, I am hereby directing you to an interesting interview on Vox in which a researcher discusses his work on bullshit. Bullshit, as the researcher defines it is:
Bullshit is different from nonsense. It’s not just random words put together. The words we use have a syntactic structure, which implies they should mean something.
The difference between bullshit and lying is that bullshit is constructed without any concern for the truth. It’s designed to impress rather than inform. And then lying, of course, is very concerned with the truth — but subverting it.
This a pretty fascinating category, no? What is it for? The first thing that springs to mind is establishing authority, which, though distinct from lying, seems to be the basic groundwork for slipping in lies by shutting down critical faculties. Bullshit is like the viral protein coat necessary to deliver some RNA lie payload.
It seems to me that bullshit is particularly rampant these days, but perhaps someone with more knowledge of history will correct me. We live in a very complex, dynamic world, and simple heuristics built into our wetware seem rather outgunned when confronted with modern, well-engineered, state-of-the-art BS. Furthermore, I notice more and more people — not just those in the business of propaganda — who make their living, in part or wholly, by spinning bullshit. Bullshit about guns, vaccines, education, politics, food, religion, terrorism, how your dotcom is helping the world — you name it.
Bullshit arising from the San Bernadino killings angered me over the last few days. Gun control advocates filled my FB feed with pleas for gun control, but the facts of the situation seem to imply that these people would have been able to perpetrate their murder under any conceivable gun control regime, except, perhaps, for a total ban with confiscation. (Which I think we can all agree is not going to happen and probably shouldn’t.) The conservative media, of course, seems aflame with innuendo about Islam and violence, justifying fear of Muslim refugees and discrimination against them. Overall, it’s too early to make much sense of this tragedy, but whether you like gun control or restrictions on refugee immigration, there’s not much in this event to support a serious argument for either. Which is to say, everything on your Facebook feed that links this story to pretty much any cause is 100% pure bullshit.
I believe traditional thinking about bullshit is that, first, people who hear bullshit that confirms their priors just let it go unprocessed because, well, why not? And second, that processing everything you hear critically is work, and most people quite rationally avoid work when they can.
I (and this researcher) wonder, though, because some people have highly sensitive bullshit detectors and can sniff it out instantly, without consulting snopes.com or WebMD. And I know plenty of people who get angry about bullshit, even when it aligns with what they already believe.
Is this some kind of immunity? Is it natural or can people be inoculated? And if the latter is possible, how do we go about it?