Bull-shit; Now what is that?
Imagine a spokesperson of a political party, facing reporters. If s/he is asked an uncomfortable question; what choices does he/she have ?
to answer with truth and all truth
or
to lie/deny/avoid
The spokesperson has to make a choice everyday, for every question, being a public figure isn’t easy. Public figures are constantly under watch. Every world they speak and write publicly is recorded, analysed and debated. If given a choice they will never speak anything which isn’t true, I suppose !!
Now if I suggest there is a technique which is utilised frequently to get out of the situation which is easy and effective, would you take it? Didn't get me? Allow me to illustrate.
Please read the following quote close to my heart;
“Deep desire of love and its longings transforms the pain into miracles of cure”
-Deepak Kapoor
Let us see the above quote, ‘longings’ and ‘transforms’ words with profound meaning, used in this sentence with ‘pain’ makes the statement feel powerful. The statement feels like it is taking you towards a deep meaning. Only it would have been true. These sentence is mere collection of words stitched to maintain syntax, they mean iota and was composed by me.
The sentence is as meaning ful as
“Desire to deepen love transforms longings of cures to miracles of pain”
Both the sentences are trying to deceit you in believing that they have a profound meaning. They are complete bullshit. They are creating a verbal smoke for you to distract you from intentions of speaker.
So as a suave politician will speak a cryptic 10 word bullshit to come out of the situation and still expect a 1000 word opinion piece in tomorrows newspaper about it.
What is Bullshit
Bullshit is any spoken or written sentence with an intention to deceit the audience. Bullshit is short of lie, it is a well designed and crafted communication. This hides the truth while just shying from lying absolutely. The bullshiters are same as habitual liars described by Saint Augustine in his essay Lying
“There is a distinction between a person who tells a lie and a liar. The former is one who tells a lie unwillingly, while the liar loves to lie and passes his time in the joy of lying. … The latter takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.”
The bullshit works better than other logical fallacies like whattaboutery or loaded language. It works better as it is more sophisticated and doesnt have a pattern to follow. You can detect a lie, but detecting bullshit which is closer to truth is difficult. Bullshit is designed with the intent of hiding in plain sight.
Lets see a bullshit statement by a public figure !
Stephan Hawking never said this, and Mr. Harsh Vardhan is well read to know this, he spoke this to please his core constituents on glory of ancient Indian science (Ironically at Indian Science Congress). But why this isn't a lie, coz turns-out there is a person named Stephan Hawkins who have said that, but alas he isn't the famous scientist.
Bullshit has been debated in academia and philosophers have deliberated over definitions, In one of the earliest works on this Harry Frankfurt in his article On Bullshit explains that bullshit is closer to bluffing than to lying. The bullshitter always aims to fake things but they might not always be untrue. (as evident in the tweet shown above, some Stephan Hawking did say that but the speaker was just bluffing his way through you )
The bullshit is always dangerous than a lie, for to speak a lie you must be concerned/aware with truth. For a bullshitter truth or lie isn’t going to hold him/her in any way to ; the aim of a Bullshitter is get his motive fulfilled
Carl Sagan in his article The fine art of baloney detection comments that he understands the audience being emotional about a subject but this shouldn't become a means to exploit them. He uses death as the symbol, when people lose their relatives they sometimes dream about meeting them, this is understandable. This in no way paves any opportunity to any quack or medium-er to claim that he/she can make contact with the dead.
Why understanding bullshit is necessary
On a daily basis we are bombarded with statements, facts, figures more than ever now history of human kind. Most of us can detect bullshit in our interpersonal relationship, but more than often we will see a plethora of statements, data, images, videos in public spaces which is on the other side of bullshit fence. We have to be on our toes to check for bullshit especially in terms of numbers. Numbers and figures are considered as torch bearers of truth and objectivity. Any data analyst will tell you this is not always true, there is more to data analysis and interpretation than numbers and beautiful graphs. Let's understand it by trying to explore probability in general data journalism.
“India has mortality rate of 3.4 percent for the persons hospitalised due to COVID-19, i.e. out of 100 people contacting COVID-19 who were hospitalised 3–4 persons will die”
If we calculate the probability of death in hospitalisation it will be 0.034. This no way means that out of every 100 people admitted 3.4 will die. The health statistics are not unconditional, there are more factors to consider before arriving at this simple figure. Please see this article by Raphel Sonabend for a detailed explanation.
Probability in general is loosely used in every profession and Ben Orlin of Math with Bad Drawings has an hilarious take on it, I am attaching images below, but do visit his website for more amazing takes on mathematics.
As you start keeping the definition of bullshit in cognisance, you will see there is ample amount of it being floated in our public space. We will have to develop an eye to spot this, Calling bullshit book by Bergstorm and West ( They run a course on this in University of Washington) is a good place to start. In this book authors take you methodologically to understand the depth of this problem and techniques to spot it.
I hope you will keep spotting prominent bullshitters and flagging them, because as per Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
I dream that we all will keep refuting bullshit, in hope that one day our public spaces will be cleaner.
PS : This is first article in a series on Spotting Bullshit, We will explore details on how data is used to tell stories which are completely false, or at best doubtful.