One of my favorite reads that has helped me navigate this post fact society is the short essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.
A PDF of the same can be found here: https://uca.edu/honors/files/2018/10/frankfurt_on-bullshit.p...
Bullshit.js
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Re: Bullshit.js
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think I wasn't smart enough to read academic articles. Then I realized that most of the authors are just terrible writers or deliberately make their papers as difficult to read as possible to obscure or exaggerate their findings.
I've known a couple academics who argued to me that this problem is systemic, rather than something that can be blamed on indiviual authors. A friend of a friend submitted a biology paper that she tried to make as jargon-free as possible, and it was rejected on the grounds that she hadn't shown a familiarity with the field. She edited it to include the dense jargon she had originally avoided, and the article was acce…
Re: Bullshit.js
#83One of my favorite reads that has helped me navigate this post fact society is the short essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit It truly nails down the argument that bullshitting is far more dangerous than lying. With the current political climate it helps make a lot more sense of the craziness.
(Key quote from the linked Wiki summary: "Frankfurt determines that bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.")
Re: Bullshit.js
#84Re: Bullshit.js
#85In the same vein as the surprisingly funny classic Cloud-to-Butt extension, which I am surprised to find is over 5 years old now: https://theawesomer.com/cloud-to-butt/276065/
Re: Bullshit.js
#86> Brings all industry-bullshitting bullshits of the Oracle Bullshits Bullshit bullshit to organizations requiring bullshits deployment options. Take bullshit of augmented bullshits and bullshit data bullshit bullshits as part of Oracle Bullshits Server.
https://www.oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/products...
Re: Bullshit.js
#87This is actually really useful. I just ran this as a sanity check on a long document I wrote, and it pointed out a bunch of lousy writing. Even better, it seems you can use it with the Hemingway App ( http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ ) as you're writing...
a more general such tool: http://proselint.com/
It comes with a bullshit module, too :)
https://github.com/amperser/proselint/blob/master/proselint/...
Re: Bullshit.js
#88I briefly made an "in the cloud" -> "on the moon" extension, and I absolutely loved the end results. Especially when I forgot that it was installed, and started reading about Amazon's new Moon.
Re: Bullshit.js
#89Desperately need this in academia. The academic literature is full of hyped-up phrasing. Probably safe to say the more hyped-up something is presented, the less novel it actually is.
I used to think I wasn't smart enough to read academic articles. Then I realized that most of the authors are just terrible writers or deliberately make their papers as difficult to read as possible to obscure or exaggerate their findings.
No. Really? shutupandtakemymoney.gif
Re: Bullshit.js
#90Author here — really happy that a joke project I did 7.5 years ago (while working at a typical outsourcing company) finally got a spotlight on HN! Please feel free to contribute! I cleaned up and modernized the repo a little recently, but didn't revise the terms list properly in a very long time (except a few obvious additions like "autonomous" and "AI"), so it's a little outdated. There's so much new bullshit to add…