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Sunday, February 21. 2016

The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

From the article:



 There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science.¹ 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.



 I have a good bullshit detector. I am skeptical of everything, to a fault.

Posted by The Barrister in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 14:51 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Would you include "40 years we've been building this machine to measure Stuff, and now we theorize about a hypothetical event a billion light years away that we captured the sound of briefly. back in Sept. Good thing it didn't happen 10 years earlier before we ready. Or on Sunday morning when nobody was here listening."
Like that?
I still think it was Joe the janitor making noise in the broom closet!
#1 Jerry on 2016-02-21 19:34 (Reply)
Lying is ubiquitous in nature.

Camouflage of all sorts, fakery, fraud and BS.

The astonishing thing is that it works as well as it does.
#2 Fred Z on 2016-02-21 22:50 (Reply)
Everyone alive and everyone who ever lived views the world, their world as having begun at their birth. Most people carry this self importance around with them throughout their life. It is far worse for a smart ambitious person in the sciences who devotes his life to learning and discovering and reaches their midlife crisis with no big accomplishment. I think the peer pressure to achieve and the personal need to be someone, to do something in their chosen field weighs heavy on them and they succumb to the temptation to exaggerate or interpolate in a way that looks like they really discovered something. I think it was JFK who said "never trust an expert, the experts are always wrong".
#3 GoneWithTheWind on 2016-02-22 00:05 (Reply)
I had a Physics professor who told us "Science is built on skepticism."

I still believe that today. It makes no sense to just accept someone's word that their 'experiment' or their 'model' works.

I carried that same skepticism into my grad studies in Economics. For years, I accepted the standard model of Keynes as gospel - as so many do. It's the way it's taught, and its flaws are glossed over because there are assumptions that "one day we'll figure those out."

Took years of studying and finally understanding the nature of the Austrian School that these will never be figured out because they are based on a flawed understanding of human nature.

Skepticism pays.
#4 Bulldog on 2016-02-22 09:01 (Reply)
My skepticism is turning into cynicism. I need to get out more. Or less.

What is the balance point between starry eyed idealism and being a curmudgeon (which I'm rapidly turning into)?
#5 Portlandmermaid on 2016-02-22 09:20 (Reply)

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