The Bullshit Presidency and the 63 million

When I first read Harry Frankfurt's explanation of bullshit, I was simply floored.  He had managed to convey in simple language what I had been struggling with inside but lacked the ability to articulate anything meaningful about it.

The book came out way back in the early years of W. Bush's second term.  While Frankfurt never made any reference to the issues of the day--like the war in Iraq--the systematic bullshit from the administration worried me as much as I was concerned about their efforts to hide the truth.  And it was this articulation of bullshit that Frankfurt provided that made all the difference to my understanding of the world around me.  Like a fog lifting to reveal a blue sky and a bright sun, Frankfurt's explanation of why the bullshitter bullshits made it all clear:

For the bullshitter…is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I highly recommended the book to anybody who asked me for suggestions.  I guest lectured about bullshit and critical thinking.  I even required students in the university's Honors Program to read the book in their preparation for the thesis work.  (One student dropped out of the program because of this requirement!)

Which is also why I was especially worried as candidate tRump started growing in strength during the Republican primaries in 2016.  I wrote about it in February 2016. 

What was beginning to reveal even then became an immense challenge after tRump gained the lead.  “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”  It is exhausting to keep refuting bullshit, and while we are at it, he produces even more.

I wrote in that post--a reminder that this was in February 2016:

Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies.  They are all bullshit.  Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors.  A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit.  You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.

If it is the golden age of bullshit, then Trump is certainly the man of the hour.

63 million, including "friends" and commenters here, voted for this bullshit artist, a conman. One of the commenters who ridiculed tRump and his "followers" later voted for him in November 2016.    To quote from Shakespeare, "So are they all, all honourable men."

The following is the unedited post from February 24, 2016:
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Ah, yes, after this topic, which is about the certainty that we all face, perhaps bullshit is one of my favorite topics.  After all, it takes a bullshitter to love bullshit ;)

People talk about the past golden age, like the golden age of cinema, or the golden age of cricket (no, not the bugs!).  We now live in a golden age, and of an interesting kind:

We are currently in a golden age of bullshit. The internet is awash with unchecked claims.

Well, I read that on the internet.  So, is that bullshit or the truth?  Isn't everything in the internet true anyway ;)

So, of course, curious people want to know who are the people who are most likely to believe the bullshit.  What is an individual’s propensity to believe in bullshit?  Develop "a Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR)" then.  What does the research show?

Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to … conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

If you believed that, you probably rank way high in the scale ;)

Seriously, that makes sense, right?  So, what can be done to make sure people will be lower in the SBR scale?

Basically, the goal here should be to get people to slow down and more carefully examine the information being presented to them. To scan it, in other words, for bullshit.

To be engaged and to examine the information is nothing but the rational, critical approach that science employs.  The scientific method.  

if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

The unfortunate aspect is that the very scientific method of questioning anything leads the people with high BSR to believe that scientific research is all bogus.  Science, on the other hand, sniffs out bullshit.  But, sometimes the scientific method cannot be enough to tackle bullshit.  Why?

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

You want a real example?  Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies.  They are all bullshit.  Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors.  A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit.  You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.

If it is the golden age of bullshit, then Trump is certainly the man of the hour.