FYI: Philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote the classic essay "On Bullshit", defining the concept. Unlike lying/fraud, where falsehood is instrumental, Frankfurt defined bullshit as potentially false speech where the truth <i>simply wasn't important</i>. Bullshit is characterized by giving the <i>surface appearance</i> of confidence, intelligence, or a convincing argument; whether it's actually true or not is besides the point.<p>The essay is only 20 pages and available here:<p><a href="http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/bullshit.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/bullshit...</a>
Who cares? Being good at bullshitting is like being a good liar or good at dissimulation. The "good" is only analogical in meaning. Virtuous intelligent people, the wise, are habituated and developed in the direction of truth and away from lies, deceit and bullshit. They have a sensitivity to the truth and the value of truth. Bullshitting requires and in turn reinforces a kind of mental dullness and blindness. It leads to a kind of degeneration of the mental faculties. If you don't care about the truth—only the parochial effects of your petty machinations—then you are frustrating the intellect and its grasp of reality. You are reinforcing vices while weakening the capacity for discernment and the strengths and virtues needed for proper intellectual function and receptivity.<p>It's a bit like what happens when an intelligent coward is met with contrary evidence. He will turn away from the truth and go to great lengths to rationalize it away, and in doing so, he will blind himself to the truth. Making that a habit through repetition only deepens the vice and unravels the mind, making it increasingly difficult to dig yourself out.
Related fun game that I like to play when there are "pop up" public art/sculpture things that appear on the street: totally ad-lib a mini-critique/-explanation for the piece there on the spot if you are there with someone else and see if you can get away with it.<p>e.g. just picking something random: <a href="https://inspiringcity.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/wp_20150830_15_06_13_pro.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://inspiringcity.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/wp_2015083...</a> and coming up with something<p>"The ethereal skeletal-form the character hewn - nay <i>assembled</i> - out of cubic masses I think really suggests a genuine fragility or frailty of humanity in a context of our modern society - you know what I mean, raising questions about the concept of self in an anonymous and increasingly digitised world. The fact this faceless figure is stationary and notably rooted solid here on the spot despite being surrounded by this busy streetscape only reminds me of our ultimate mortality, and that our place - <i>our mark we leave</i> - in the universe is merely fleeting... the artist really hammered this point home I think by the use of rusting steel: nothing is permanent, dust to dust ashes to ashes and all that. Moving stuff."<p>It is fun - bonus points for ending the critique with "Ultimately, it is about mans's inhumanity to man" for every piece :-)<p>I like to think that I've been able to get away with it loads of times now ("gee - I just thought it was a rusty metal man statue"). My wife now rolls my eyes whenever I do it with friends, but she lets me have my fun :)
<i>Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is No.</i>
From the abstract:<p>> ... Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that bullshit ability is predictive of participants’ intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be higher in intelligence. ...<p>This abstract reads like bullshit.<p>The paper defines "bullshiting," but not "intelligence." Nor do the authors even seem interested in addressing any of the numerous problems in measuring human intelligence.<p>The "intelligence" tests being used appear to be:<p>- Wordsum Task. The Wordsum task is a 10-item vocabulary test commonly used as a measure of verbal intelligence (see Malhotra et al., 2007 for a review). In this task, a word in large print (e.g., “CLOISTERED”) appears above a series of smaller print words (e.g., bunched, secluded, malady, miniature, arched). Participants’ objective is to pick a small print word that is the best synonym for the large print target word. Scores on the Wordsum task were equal to the total number of correct responses provided.<p>- Raven’s Progressive Matrices. We administered Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) as a measure of abstract reasoning and non-verbal fluid intelligence (Bilker et al., 2012). In this task, participants are presented with a partially obscured visual pattern and must select the available pattern fragment that will successfully complete the pattern. The RPM is comprised of 60 items broken up into five levels of difficulty. In order to decrease time demands on participants, we randomly selected four items from each of the five difficulty levels, resulting in 20 RPM items being presented in Study 1. We calculated an RPM score for each participant by calculating the number of correct responses they provided.<p>Assuming this study was in fact performed and isn't some weird bullshit inception joke, these "intelligence" tests seem flawed at best.
It reminds me of a game called "Nobody is perfect" where there are cards with names and words that usually only few people know (don't worry, nobody is perfect). Goal is to write convincing explanations for them.<p>Each turn, one player draws a card, reads out the word, name or situation listed and writes down the correct answer shown on the backside. All others think up an explanation and write this on their piece of paper instead. At the end of each turn, the sheets are collected, shuffled, read out by the active player and the players have to vote for the answer that they think is most likely to be correct. Points are awarded if they chose the correct answer and additional points for everyone they fooled with their own creation.<p>(And now the question is whether the described game actually exists.)
What they are measuring is the confidence levels of an individual and how they relate to us trusting them or detecting something is amiss.<p>A version of this is Practical Intelligence, an ability to talk your way out of situations or to talk about things which will soothe or convince the listener. I think this is a separate skill in itself, and has nothing to do with your general IQ levels (based on empirical evidence only, dont know of any study). This is something I found lacking in me where others would get out of an assignment or a test in school based on just convincing the teacher alone, or get access to things, work done from others while I would be left wondering how the hell they did it. It is an important skill to be taught - knowing what to say in front of who in any situation - to buid rapport, get support, connect on an emotional level (things I have struggled with occasionally hence those are more noticeable) and more like this to help you succeed in this world.
Back when I was younger, I would bullshit on software interviews with great success. I say "bullshit" because I would talk with a high degree of "confidence" about topics and technologies that I had barely read about or had experience with.<p>"Scaling a service to millions of requests per second? Sure, you will need X, Y, and Z."<p>Now, on the other side of the table, I am quick to spot the bullshit.<p>Also, I realize how criminal those interviews were back then. I was answering architect level questions asked by a senior engineer when applying for a junior level position.
This reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Galapagos, in which the human race evolves beyond the era of really big brains since they weren't doing us that much good after all and made our heads less streamlined for swimming after fish.
Side issue, but if someone is going to bullshit me, I really appreciate it if they do a good job. Put some effort in. Make it believable.<p>Otherwise, you're insulting my intelligence, and maybe it's just my ego, but having my intelligence insulted offends me more than being lied to does.
I think this type of thinking is dangerous because there are at least two factors at play when it comes to bullshitting:<p>1. Ability to bullshit<p>2. Willingness to bullshit<p>And I think the second one is inversely correlated with intelligence. It's short term thinking which tends to lead to trouble in the long run. Truly smart people know that there will be a point when reality will catch up with their BS; especially if they're dealing with other smart people.<p>I think BS has worked pretty well so far because most people are delusional and they'd rather lie to themselves and maintain their existing relationships rather than admit that they've been duped into using an inferior product or service.
Plenty of dumb people bullshit and plenty of smart people don’t. I saw another comment here I agree with - your intelligence probably correlates with the quality of bullshit, assuming equal motivation.
I don't think so: Listen to Alibaba founder Jack Ma, he is a lucky persistent guy turned business leader. He is actually air-headed, but people still listen to his BS because he is rich. Money speaks...but substance? Not necessarily<p>I will actually say that people who are able to detect BS are more intelligent still, because truth is so rare.
I bet activities and educational environments that correlate (for whatever reason) with higher-than-average intelligence train for bullshitting, directly or indirectly. Improv, verbal sparring games (e.g. "Questions"), debate, small-group discussion-driven instruction styles (as the Harkness method of Phillips Exeter Academy)
What a great bullshit-article (pun intended)!<p>However it completely forgets the willingness aspect.
I think a lot of smart people are brilliant bullshitters, however they have morale and pride which make them avoid this.
I'll bet this article will be shared among CEO friends, "See, we are smart!"
Also related: The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies by Charles Eisenstein: <a href="https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-lies/" rel="nofollow">https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-o...</a>.
It seems to describe how I generally argue. I guess as long as I'm called intelligent, I can agree to be called a bullshitter too?<p>It's true that being able to "navigate" vague ideas of politics, economics, philosophy, communication, and understand how others perceive those ideas, enables one intelligent person to play with those ideas to make some bullshit.<p>The problem is that when ideas are not precisely defined, or when those ideas are controversial and/or misused because they're important societal values, it gives more and more opportunity for someone to make bullshit.<p>I mean you can't bullshit about quantum physics or advanced math. But it's easier to do it for law or social sciences.
Exploiting information asymmetry and lying, like any other form of adversarial information manipulation, requires skill. And applying intelligence can be an effective way to acquire an skill.<p>You can also acquire bullshit skills from knowledge transfer, and you can become effective at bullshit in that way.<p>You can train an entire sales force using a script in order to convince customers to buy stuff they do not need, like insurance, using bullshit pretenses. While that will make a lot of people good at bullshit, that does not mean those people will become more intelligent.
> "Bullshitting, a style of communication characterised by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for the truth"<p>A wonderful and suprisingly precise definition.
Reminds me of another paper [1] on bullshitters
about which we discussed in details here.[2]<p>[1]: <a href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130</a>
"Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of high score on Raven’s Progressive Matrices"<p>The study is equivocating intelligence with RPM, and I feel I missed the paper that proved that RPM was an accurate measure of intelligence? Or that we even arrived at a general consensus on the formal definition of intelligence.
sure, bullshitting is a form of imagination, and imagination is a sign of intelligence.<p>but intelligence in itself is not enough. evil masterminds are intelligent too.<p>it also matters how that intelligence is used. if you use it for bullshitting, you are at best wasting someones time, and at worst you are deceiving them.
> We interpret these results as adding further evidence for human intelligence being naturally geared towards the efficient navigation of social systems.<p>Seems to be a talking about a very specific type of intelligence, e.g. quite different from the stereotypical geek.
"Life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way." - Bob Dylan
Bullshitters are observed to be intelligent. That is true. Confident bullshitters are assumed to be intelligent but thats because of the confidence factor. Intelligent people usually outthink themselves and "appear" doubtful when the actual case is they are considering all possible options.<p>I think it should be possible to amplify bullshit to such a degree that everyone can see the absurdity.
It would make sense that imbeciles have a harder time bullshitting. You can't continually bullshit someone that is more knowledgable on a topic.<p>Though it would seem bullshit ability is more closely tied to that knowledge gap between participants than anything.<p>e.g. mechanic with an IQ of 85 easily bullshits the economist with an IQ of 125 into more mechanical work than is required.