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Bullshit.js

mourner.github.io

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Re: Bullshit.js

#81
post #13

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...

Ah wonderful. I also recommend the cute little book if you like physical versions.

Re: Bullshit.js

#82

Earlier 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…

It definitely seems systemic. Scientific papers have a pretty distinct style. "Familiarity with the field" is something rather hard to check when reviewing the paper, but one of the easiest proxy for it is whether your paper sounds like every other paper. The expected side effect of immersing yourself in a field is that you pick up its style.

Re: Bullshit.js

#83
post #13

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.

Yeah. Bullshit is the Chaotic Evil of epistemology.

(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

#84
As always with these bookmarklets that load additional JS from a remote source: Be sure you understand the possible security implications. You're essentially XSS attacking yourself if that JS source is turning hostile for any reason. One possible solution is to use SRI to ensure the linked JS doesn't load if it changes for any reason, but doesn't work in that case as the CDN (unpkg.com) doesn't add a CORS header.

Re: Bullshit.js

#85

In 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/

I still use it with one of my browsers, but I never remember which one - which leads to occasional surprises on HN :).

Re: Bullshit.js

#86
> Oracle Bullshits Products: Oracle Bullshits Server

> 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

#87

This 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/

Thanks this looks very useful. It explicitly strives to minimize false positives.

It comes with a bullshit module, too :)

https://github.com/amperser/proselint/blob/master/proselint/...

Re: Bullshit.js

#88
Sadly not able to translate "expert" into "bullshitter". Entertaining though!

I 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

#89

Desperately 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.

A huge amount of them can be summarized as "if your X fits these highly unlikely criteria, a highly specialized Y can give you 1% better results than a long-standing general algorithm that already works and you can probably use within 5 minutes".

No. Really? shutupandtakemymoney.gif

Re: Bullshit.js

#90
post #53

Author 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…

Looks like you got a few PR's out of it mine included (serverless - all in good fun):

https://github.com/mourner/bullshit.js/pulls

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