Another thing you had was a huge body of men who'd been through a massive, life-changing experience together. One that took immense risk and sacrifice but ultimately ended in victory (at least for us Americans).
If you believe that people are capable at all of learning from experience, they must have brought something away from that.
Well, you are ignoring polysemy here; yes "bullshit" can refer to tall tales like your drinking fifty gallons of beer. However there are other senses of the word, including topics of serious inquiry in the field of epistemics.
I refer you to Professor H.G. Frankfurt's seminal work, On Bullshit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-12294-6.) for more information.
I find that Socratic debate usually convinces the other person that you are attacking them and their stated belief fairly quickly even if actually just honestly wanting more information.
Well, you're in good company on that one. As I recall Socrates ruffled his share of feathers.
That said, I'm talking about satisfying yourself. Convincing others necessarily involves making allowances for their muddy thinking.
Except I have seen no data from the Swedish government, which publishes extremely comprehensive crime data (something we would do well to copy), to support the Syrian crime wave story. I've gone through Brottsförebyggande rådet data and it's just not there.
What I have seen is a lot of sloppy correlation and overprojection of statistical noise. For example Sweden amended its legal definition of "sexual assault" to be much, much broader, generating a spate of spurious stories about a Swedish rape epidemic.
Again, you're confusing "lying" with "bullshitting". Lying is about establishing belief in a false version of the world, which is best done, as you point out, by omission. That's because lying depends on peoples' regard for the facts; it exploits that. Being caught in a false assertion destroys a lie's effectiveness, so a smart liar sticks to the facts.
Bullshitting is about inculcating the desired feelings and attitudes in the audience. While a bullshitter doesn't hesitate to use facts when they suit his purpose, he doesn't hesitate to make shit up either, because it doesn't matter if he's caught. It doesn't even matter if he asserts two inconsistent things in the course of a single sentence.
Why?
Because bullshitting doesn't aim to establish belief in propositions; propositions are completely disposable. Once it has done its job, a piece of bullshit (unlike a lie) is a nullity. You can show that it is false, but the bullshitter's adherents won't perceive that as inconsistent; not as long as the bullshitter is conveying the same attitude.
That's why fact checking a bullshitter is a waste of time, once you've established that's what he is. It doesn't matter if you prove something he said was wrong, unless you do it in a way that changes his audience's feelings.
Actually the policy conclusion is not correct, however without a sophisticated understanding of statistics it's easy to be misled.
It is true that a higher proportion of immigrants commit crimes in Sweden than natives. However, if you break down immigrants by socioeconomic status and educational attainment you don't see any difference between immigrants and natives. This is because of something called Simpson's Paradox.
What's happening here is that Sweden is a wealthy advanced country with a low birth rate, and it's been importing low-education poor workers to augment it's own dwindling underclass in filling low-paying jobs. Now poor, uneducated people commit many kinds of crimes at a higher rate that affluent, educated people. Whether they are native or immigrant makes no difference. So what the Swedish statistics actually tell us is that uneducated low-wage workers make up a higher proportion of immigrants than they do of natives, which should be no surprise because that's why the largest proportion of immigrants have been admitted.
This also raises another possibility: you can actually reduce crime rates with immigration, if you let in the right people. In fact there is evidence this is happening in Canada, which places a premium on education and language skills when deciding who to admit.
Actually the defining characteristic of conspiracy theories is that they get you to believe things which contradict things common sense tells you are so unlikely they're bound to be false, e.g., that people do things that are against their interests, that mutual enemies act with perfect trust in each other.
It is no conspiracy theory that the Nixon White House covered up Watergate, even though that is a theory about a conspiracy. In fact Watergate shows you the problem with most conspiracy theories: massive cover ups are impossible to maintain for very long. Something as big as the government leaks information constantly.
As I get older I realize how big and difficult objective "truth" is. It's easy to get hold of bits of the truth, the challenge is to get hold of enough of the truth and enough kinds of truth to make sound judgments.
That said, detecting bullshit is not intellectually challenging -- in fact I'd argue that's the defining characteristic of bullshit. Bullshit is easy to detect when it's aimed at other people. So why is bullshit so hard to resist when it's aimed at you?
Because bullshit tempts you to believe what is easy, convenient and apparently self-serving. A person with perfect moral courage, who is incorruptibly fair-minded and objective, such a person would be completely impervious to bullshit. But all of us, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum, fall far short of that ideal.
That's why advance-fee scams hoodwink people who manifestly have the intellectual ability to see through them... when they're directed at other people. But as soon as the opportunity for personal gain enters the picture it becomes a struggle between greed and intellect. Even if your intellect is formidable it's useless to you once your greed is engaged.
That's why I say detecting bullshit is an exercise in moral character.
A conventional lie is detectable because of the network of falsehoods that must necessarily support a consistent sounding alternative picture of the world. Often the best way to detect a liar is to invite him to elaborate on his statements, until the entire fabric of falsehood is unsupportable.
Bullshit doesn't try to create an elaborately self-consistent fabric of false beliefs. Bullshit doesn't even bother being consistent with itself. Bullshit persuade through the power of how it makes you feel in the moment, and as a bullshitter rattles on he keeps his audience enthralled moment by moment even as he contradicts himself.
So to detect lies you need epistemological skills. To detect bullshit you need strength of character.
Even anti-Trump people want to hear about something else once in a while.
Actually not. Our appetite for anti-Trump information is apparently insatiable, and that's a problem for us. In fact I think it's one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college.
Like everything else, negative information reaches a point of diminishing returns. There comes a point where more bad news doesn't hurt you any more, but crowds out other news. In a divisive election, you win by getting more supporters to the polls than your opponent, and for that you need media bandwidth. So while Hillary's favorable/unfavorable ratings were consistently far better than Trump's even when they were under water, Trump was hogging all the media attention she needed to make the most of that advantage. Trump was ratings gold, because people who despised him as a buffoon simply adored stories which confirmed that fact.
And if you're a Trump supporter, take heart: we haven't seemed to learn anything. We still haven't figured out we can't rely on Trump's buffoonery, that we have to craft a positive message and deliver it into places where he has support.
This is true. Authoritarian leaders often make a point of forcing their high-ranking subordinates to embarrass themselves too, which prevents and subordinates from gaining popular support.
I'll go farther: everyone has bad days where they do things they shouldn't do. Especially in matters of the heart and loosely affiliated organs. I'm not a big fan of knee-jerk firing in response to an accusation.
It's the inevitability of this that means an organization needs to be prepared to handle problems like this, and that's the problem here: the organization, not the supervisor. If the atmosphere described here is accurate, then management and HR aren't doing their jobs.
This underlies the perennial complaint about consultants borrowing your watch to tell you what time it is. Somehow in the thick of managing things on a day to day basis you lose sight of the obvious.
First of all, moderators, while I disagree with this guy's opinion, it's not a troll. It's just an opinion we disagree with. Learn the difference.
That said, making a sexual advance to a subordinate right off the bat is just plain stupid. You don't know each other, and anyone in her position would feel uncomfortable. It's an office, not a bar. People are there to work, and what's more they can't avoid each other. That's why you need professionalism in your job conduct.
HR's response was also stupid. In business you often get into trouble by saying too much, and that's exactly what they did. They could have said, "We've issued a verbal and written reprimand and will be watching this situation closely; let us know if more this kind of thing happens." Instead they had to bring in the fact that this guy was a "high performer", implying at least that this gives him a license ordinary managers don't have. Now I think we can all assume that on some level high performers get leeway that low performers don't. But saying so is stupid. It's pretty much tantamount to a confession that you don't take this seriously.
Then they compound the stupidity by telling her to expect a bad review from this guy because she brought this up. This pretty much is an admission that HR and management countenance unprofessionalism, allowing managers to use employee reviews to pursue personal issues rather than evaluating the employee's contribution to the company.
That's just asinine. If it's false you're undermining employee confidence in the review and performance reward system for no reason. If it's true you should be fixing it, an in the interim keeping your mouth shut.
Now I'd say you should keep your work and personal (e.g. sex) life separate, but I know some companies don't give employees time to have a personal life. If a company does that you're absolutely right, your HR people are going to have a tough time navigating the line between advances and harassment. All the more reason not to be sloppy. If someone in such an environment can't broach the subject with tact, he'd better be prepared to be celibate.
Good thing that's not what they're actually doing.
If you read the actual GAO report, it doesn't say the rocket costs twenty-three billion. That's the cost of "the first planned SLS flight, the ground systems for that effort, and the first two Orion flights." In other words the costs to meet certain early program milestones, including costs which should properly be amortized across the lifetime of the rocket and crew vehicle.
The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.
That's still a lot of money. Even if you go with expendable costs of half a billion, and billions for the whole mission for sure, well, it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls. Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.
Let me ask you a simple question. Ignoring the sexism, which doesn't apply to you, read her description of the corporate culture and tell me: does this sound like a place you'd like to work?
It isn't just sexism, she describes a generally toxic work culture in which all kinds of problems can arise and persist. It's one where managers are focused on competing with each other, even to the point of undermining their supervisors; you might let a problem ride for a bit because you might need to use it against them later.
Now granted, this might not be a fair description of Uber's culture. Or her perceptions might be colored by what was a string of bad luck. But we all know places that shade this way exist. The problem of a organizations that are at the same time bureaucratic and cutthroat go way back. What she describes could be the politics of an old-time royal court.
Why? Why does this kind of culture crop up again and again in human history?
I think because ruthless internal competition offsets some of the natural lethargy of a bureaucracy. It can serve the interests of whoever is on top, at least in the short term. If you have no talent for inspiring people you can at least set them against each other. But you'd be a fool to join such an organization at the bottom, knowing what it is, if you had any alternatives.
Well, let's leave aside the fact that it wasn't the guy's first offense. What would you, as a professional HR person or senior manager, do about that situation?
I tell you what I wouldn't do: I wouldn't issue a warning and assume it just magically fixed the problem. I'd follow up and continue monitoring the situation.
Or, perhaps, your own understanding of physics is bullshit because, well. Physics is bullshit. And this is why physics hasn't accomplished anything significant since the atom bomb. It's mental masturbation.
Well here's some things physicists have done after the bomb that I thought of off the top of my head: Lasers (and laser-related stuff like laser spectroscopy), Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Holograms, atomic clocks, high temperature superconductors, tunnel diode, scanning tunneling electron microscope, atomic force microscope, stochastic resonance, charged coupled devices... All kinds of stuff that maybe isn't as high profile as the atomic bomb, but are essential to things you take for granted, like flash memory and liquid crystal displays in your electronics or the Hall effect sensors in your anti-lock brakes.
In any case, leaving aside the obvious hooey , if physics were mental masturbation then anyone could do it. It's the fact that so few can do it that makes so many people see it as a pointless and trivial exercise.
You might not think so, because elemental lead is not water-soluble. However compounds of lead like hydroxides or carbonates are soluble and can form from elemental lead by contact with water, e.g., 2Pb + O2 + 2H2O -> 2 Pb(OH)2.
This is why it's perfectly safe to drink wine from leaded crystal wine glasses, but a bad idea to store wine in a leaded crystal decanter.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing you had was a huge body of men who'd been through a massive, life-changing experience together. One that took immense risk and sacrifice but ultimately ended in victory (at least for us Americans).
If you believe that people are capable at all of learning from experience, they must have brought something away from that.
I am not arguing over definitions at all. You are. I am describing a phenomenon you are free to describe with different words if that rings your bell.
Well, you are ignoring polysemy here; yes "bullshit" can refer to tall tales like your drinking fifty gallons of beer. However there are other senses of the word, including topics of serious inquiry in the field of epistemics.
I refer you to Professor H.G. Frankfurt's seminal work, On Bullshit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-12294-6.) for more information.
I find that Socratic debate usually convinces the other person that you are attacking them and their stated belief fairly quickly even if actually just honestly wanting more information.
Well, you're in good company on that one. As I recall Socrates ruffled his share of feathers.
That said, I'm talking about satisfying yourself. Convincing others necessarily involves making allowances for their muddy thinking.
Except I have seen no data from the Swedish government, which publishes extremely comprehensive crime data (something we would do well to copy), to support the Syrian crime wave story. I've gone through Brottsförebyggande rådet data and it's just not there.
What I have seen is a lot of sloppy correlation and overprojection of statistical noise. For example Sweden amended its legal definition of "sexual assault" to be much, much broader, generating a spate of spurious stories about a Swedish rape epidemic.
Again, you're confusing "lying" with "bullshitting". Lying is about establishing belief in a false version of the world, which is best done, as you point out, by omission. That's because lying depends on peoples' regard for the facts; it exploits that. Being caught in a false assertion destroys a lie's effectiveness, so a smart liar sticks to the facts.
Bullshitting is about inculcating the desired feelings and attitudes in the audience. While a bullshitter doesn't hesitate to use facts when they suit his purpose, he doesn't hesitate to make shit up either, because it doesn't matter if he's caught. It doesn't even matter if he asserts two inconsistent things in the course of a single sentence.
Why?
Because bullshitting doesn't aim to establish belief in propositions; propositions are completely disposable. Once it has done its job, a piece of bullshit (unlike a lie) is a nullity. You can show that it is false, but the bullshitter's adherents won't perceive that as inconsistent; not as long as the bullshitter is conveying the same attitude.
That's why fact checking a bullshitter is a waste of time, once you've established that's what he is. It doesn't matter if you prove something he said was wrong, unless you do it in a way that changes his audience's feelings.
Actually the policy conclusion is not correct, however without a sophisticated understanding of statistics it's easy to be misled.
It is true that a higher proportion of immigrants commit crimes in Sweden than natives. However, if you break down immigrants by socioeconomic status and educational attainment you don't see any difference between immigrants and natives. This is because of something called Simpson's Paradox.
What's happening here is that Sweden is a wealthy advanced country with a low birth rate, and it's been importing low-education poor workers to augment it's own dwindling underclass in filling low-paying jobs. Now poor, uneducated people commit many kinds of crimes at a higher rate that affluent, educated people. Whether they are native or immigrant makes no difference. So what the Swedish statistics actually tell us is that uneducated low-wage workers make up a higher proportion of immigrants than they do of natives, which should be no surprise because that's why the largest proportion of immigrants have been admitted.
This also raises another possibility: you can actually reduce crime rates with immigration, if you let in the right people. In fact there is evidence this is happening in Canada, which places a premium on education and language skills when deciding who to admit.
Actually the defining characteristic of conspiracy theories is that they get you to believe things which contradict things common sense tells you are so unlikely they're bound to be false, e.g., that people do things that are against their interests, that mutual enemies act with perfect trust in each other.
It is no conspiracy theory that the Nixon White House covered up Watergate, even though that is a theory about a conspiracy. In fact Watergate shows you the problem with most conspiracy theories: massive cover ups are impossible to maintain for very long. Something as big as the government leaks information constantly.
As I get older I realize how big and difficult objective "truth" is. It's easy to get hold of bits of the truth, the challenge is to get hold of enough of the truth and enough kinds of truth to make sound judgments.
That said, detecting bullshit is not intellectually challenging -- in fact I'd argue that's the defining characteristic of bullshit. Bullshit is easy to detect when it's aimed at other people. So why is bullshit so hard to resist when it's aimed at you?
Because bullshit tempts you to believe what is easy, convenient and apparently self-serving. A person with perfect moral courage, who is incorruptibly fair-minded and objective, such a person would be completely impervious to bullshit. But all of us, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum, fall far short of that ideal.
That's why advance-fee scams hoodwink people who manifestly have the intellectual ability to see through them ... when they're directed at other people. But as soon as the opportunity for personal gain enters the picture it becomes a struggle between greed and intellect. Even if your intellect is formidable it's useless to you once your greed is engaged.
That's why I say detecting bullshit is an exercise in moral character.
A conventional lie is detectable because of the network of falsehoods that must necessarily support a consistent sounding alternative picture of the world. Often the best way to detect a liar is to invite him to elaborate on his statements, until the entire fabric of falsehood is unsupportable.
Bullshit doesn't try to create an elaborately self-consistent fabric of false beliefs. Bullshit doesn't even bother being consistent with itself. Bullshit persuade through the power of how it makes you feel in the moment, and as a bullshitter rattles on he keeps his audience enthralled moment by moment even as he contradicts himself.
So to detect lies you need epistemological skills. To detect bullshit you need strength of character.
Can you get high?
Even anti-Trump people want to hear about something else once in a while.
Actually not. Our appetite for anti-Trump information is apparently insatiable, and that's a problem for us. In fact I think it's one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college.
Like everything else, negative information reaches a point of diminishing returns. There comes a point where more bad news doesn't hurt you any more, but crowds out other news. In a divisive election, you win by getting more supporters to the polls than your opponent, and for that you need media bandwidth. So while Hillary's favorable/unfavorable ratings were consistently far better than Trump's even when they were under water, Trump was hogging all the media attention she needed to make the most of that advantage. Trump was ratings gold, because people who despised him as a buffoon simply adored stories which confirmed that fact.
And if you're a Trump supporter, take heart: we haven't seemed to learn anything. We still haven't figured out we can't rely on Trump's buffoonery, that we have to craft a positive message and deliver it into places where he has support.
Slashdot posts a couple of articles a week that invite Trump bashing.
AKA "actual news".
This is true. Authoritarian leaders often make a point of forcing their high-ranking subordinates to embarrass themselves too, which prevents and subordinates from gaining popular support.
I'll go farther: everyone has bad days where they do things they shouldn't do. Especially in matters of the heart and loosely affiliated organs. I'm not a big fan of knee-jerk firing in response to an accusation.
It's the inevitability of this that means an organization needs to be prepared to handle problems like this, and that's the problem here: the organization, not the supervisor. If the atmosphere described here is accurate, then management and HR aren't doing their jobs.
Precisely.
This underlies the perennial complaint about consultants borrowing your watch to tell you what time it is. Somehow in the thick of managing things on a day to day basis you lose sight of the obvious.
First of all, moderators, while I disagree with this guy's opinion, it's not a troll. It's just an opinion we disagree with. Learn the difference.
That said, making a sexual advance to a subordinate right off the bat is just plain stupid. You don't know each other, and anyone in her position would feel uncomfortable. It's an office, not a bar. People are there to work, and what's more they can't avoid each other. That's why you need professionalism in your job conduct.
HR's response was also stupid. In business you often get into trouble by saying too much, and that's exactly what they did. They could have said, "We've issued a verbal and written reprimand and will be watching this situation closely; let us know if more this kind of thing happens." Instead they had to bring in the fact that this guy was a "high performer", implying at least that this gives him a license ordinary managers don't have. Now I think we can all assume that on some level high performers get leeway that low performers don't. But saying so is stupid. It's pretty much tantamount to a confession that you don't take this seriously.
Then they compound the stupidity by telling her to expect a bad review from this guy because she brought this up. This pretty much is an admission that HR and management countenance unprofessionalism, allowing managers to use employee reviews to pursue personal issues rather than evaluating the employee's contribution to the company.
That's just asinine. If it's false you're undermining employee confidence in the review and performance reward system for no reason. If it's true you should be fixing it, an in the interim keeping your mouth shut.
Now I'd say you should keep your work and personal (e.g. sex) life separate, but I know some companies don't give employees time to have a personal life. If a company does that you're absolutely right, your HR people are going to have a tough time navigating the line between advances and harassment. All the more reason not to be sloppy. If someone in such an environment can't broach the subject with tact, he'd better be prepared to be celibate.
Good thing that's not what they're actually doing.
If you read the actual GAO report, it doesn't say the rocket costs twenty-three billion. That's the cost of "the first planned SLS flight, the ground systems for that effort, and the first two Orion flights." In other words the costs to meet certain early program milestones, including costs which should properly be amortized across the lifetime of the rocket and crew vehicle.
The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.
That's still a lot of money. Even if you go with expendable costs of half a billion, and billions for the whole mission for sure, well, it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls. Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.
Let me ask you a simple question. Ignoring the sexism, which doesn't apply to you, read her description of the corporate culture and tell me: does this sound like a place you'd like to work?
It isn't just sexism, she describes a generally toxic work culture in which all kinds of problems can arise and persist. It's one where managers are focused on competing with each other, even to the point of undermining their supervisors; you might let a problem ride for a bit because you might need to use it against them later.
Now granted, this might not be a fair description of Uber's culture. Or her perceptions might be colored by what was a string of bad luck. But we all know places that shade this way exist. The problem of a organizations that are at the same time bureaucratic and cutthroat go way back. What she describes could be the politics of an old-time royal court.
Why? Why does this kind of culture crop up again and again in human history?
I think because ruthless internal competition offsets some of the natural lethargy of a bureaucracy. It can serve the interests of whoever is on top, at least in the short term. If you have no talent for inspiring people you can at least set them against each other. But you'd be a fool to join such an organization at the bottom, knowing what it is, if you had any alternatives.
Well, let's leave aside the fact that it wasn't the guy's first offense. What would you, as a professional HR person or senior manager, do about that situation?
I tell you what I wouldn't do: I wouldn't issue a warning and assume it just magically fixed the problem. I'd follow up and continue monitoring the situation.
"Former" engineer - tells you all you need to know.
That tells us everything we need to know about your thinking ability.
Or, perhaps, your own understanding of physics is bullshit because, well. Physics is bullshit. And this is why physics hasn't accomplished anything significant since the atom bomb. It's mental masturbation.
Well here's some things physicists have done after the bomb that I thought of off the top of my head: Lasers (and laser-related stuff like laser spectroscopy), Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Holograms, atomic clocks, high temperature superconductors, tunnel diode, scanning tunneling electron microscope, atomic force microscope, stochastic resonance, charged coupled devices... All kinds of stuff that maybe isn't as high profile as the atomic bomb, but are essential to things you take for granted, like flash memory and liquid crystal displays in your electronics or the Hall effect sensors in your anti-lock brakes.
In any case, leaving aside the obvious hooey , if physics were mental masturbation then anyone could do it. It's the fact that so few can do it that makes so many people see it as a pointless and trivial exercise.
Shouldn't "News for Nerds" be news to nerds?
You might not think so, because elemental lead is not water-soluble. However compounds of lead like hydroxides or carbonates are soluble and can form from elemental lead by contact with water, e.g., 2Pb + O2 + 2H2O -> 2 Pb(OH)2.
This is why it's perfectly safe to drink wine from leaded crystal wine glasses, but a bad idea to store wine in a leaded crystal decanter.
He's a kind of IP troll save that he's bereft of any actual IP.
Which means he's not an IP troll at all. What he is, is a glory hog. It's a bad thing to be, but not every bad thing to be is the same thing.