To get rid of bullshit, or at least reduce it, it is useful to give a definition of bullshit. What is the difference between old school bullshit and new school bullshit?
It is best to illustrate with examples.
Old school bullshit:
Our collective mission is to functionalize bilateral solutions for leveraging underutilized human resource portfolio opportunities. (In other words, we are a temp agency.)
We exist as transmissions. To embark on the myth is to become one with it. (We might call this new-age old-school bullshit.)
Just as our forefathers before us, we look to the unending horizons of our great nation with minds fixed and hearts aflame to rekindle the dampened sparks of our collective destiny. (Spare us. How are you going bring jobs back to the district?)
Calling Bullshit, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
Old-school bullshit is here to stay, but it may be overshadowed by the ambitious and more sophisticated new-school bullshit. The new school bullshit is a mighty force, because it uses tools most people trust (math, science, statistics) to give the false impression of rigor. If you want to seem legitimate in the modern world, it helps to have a graphs and numbers.
New-school bullshit:
Adjusted for currency exchange rates, our top-performing global fund beat the market in seven of the past nine years. (How exactly were returns adjusted? How many of the company’s funds failed to beat the market and by how much? For that matter, was there a single fund that beat the market in seven of nine years, or was it a different fund that beat the market in each of those seven years?)
While short of statistical significance (p = 0.13), our results underscore the clinically important effect size (relative odds of survival at five years = 1.3) of our targeted oncotherapy and challenge the current therapeutic paradigm. (What does it mean for a result to be clinically important if it is not statistically significant? Is five-year survival a relevant measure for this particular cancer, or are most patients deceased within three years? Why should we imagine that any of this “challenges the current therapeutic paradigm”?)
Our systematic screening revealed that 34 percent of behaviorally challenged second graders admit to having sniffed Magic Markers at least once in the past year. (Why does it matter? And if it does, is marker-sniffing a cause or a consequence of being “behaviorally challenged”? What fraction of nonchallenged second graders admit to sniffing Magic Markers? Perhaps that fraction is even higher!)
Calling Bullshit, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
New-school bullshit is effective because, unless you are a trained to, you don’t feel qualified to challenge quantitative information that you don’t understand. But it is not only scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon that can fool you into believing something that is false.
In an article, titled Why Bullshit is no Laughing Matter, we are told about the pervasiveness of bullshit in the modern age.
We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation. Indeed, you have likely come across more bullshit so far this week than a normal person living 1,000 years ago would in their entire lifetime. If we were to add up every word in every scholarly piece of work published prior to the Enlightenment, this number would still pale in comparison with the number of words used to promulgate bullshit on the internet in the 21st century alone.
Of course, this paragraph is full of shit. He could not possibly know how much bullshit you have come across this week, and he has even less of an idea about the life of a ‘normal’ person living a thousand years ago.
When the objective is to impress, or in Frankfurt’s words, to be pretentious, then it is up to you to figure out if what the writer is saying is true or ‘truthy’. ‘Truthy’ is a word that I first came across when watching The Colbert Report. A claim that is ‘truthy’ sounds like it’s true, but is not necessarily true. Most of what passes for new school bullshit, has this element of truthiness.