
The Fine Art of Bullshit, Killed by Google - JacobAldridge
https://medium.com/funny-stuff/the-fine-art-of-bullshit-c09f7bbb391e
======
jdietrich
_" Where can I find a women's shelter?"_

 _" Is it normal to be attracted to other boys?"_

 _" Can I claim food stamps?"_

 _" Is my employer allowed to deduct breakages from my pay?"_

 _" How much is cassava selling for in Lagos?"_

Knowledge changes lives. As technologists, we are at the forefront of a
revolution that has the potential to banish ignorance forever, for everyone.
We have a basic moral duty to honour that responsibility, to recognise the
real risks of what we are doing, and to work for the benefit of humanity.

The fun of bullshitting is something I am happy to accept as a casualty of
war. Frankly, I think it's rather bourgeois to gripe about it.

I'm far more concerned about personalised search results inadvertently working
to intellectually ghettoise us and reinforce prejudices. I'm concerned about
the effect that paywalled academic journals might be having on the spread of
pseudoscience. I'm concerned that IT systems are being designed predominantly
by middle-class Americans in liberal cities, who are often ignorant of how
their design decisions might affect people who are living in more repressive
environments.

Bullshit should die unmourned, because we've got more important things to
worry about.

~~~
jljljl
It's possible to both lament the loss of bullshitting, and the interaction it
generates, while also appreciating the significant improvements technology has
brought.

------
mark_l_watson
I find it difficult to relate to negative comments (for easy access to
information) in this thread.

A story that might be interesting: We live in Arizona. Last year two old guys
(really old, about my age :-) got out of their pickup truck and walked over to
me while I was gassing up our car and asked for directions to some obscure
little town. After asking why they were travelling (they were on the way to
some distant relative's house for a party) I pulled out my droid phone and
used the voice interface to Google Now to ask for driving directions; we also
got a warning about a road closure. Neither of these guys had ever owned a
computer so they asked the obvious questions of how much would a similar phone
cost and where to get one. I would bet that they had a smart phone within
days. +1 for easy access to information.

------
JoshTriplett
The story posted in the article provides a romanticized illustration of how
finding knowledge in a world without easy access to it can produce an
adventure. (I like that it doesn't directly say which of the 1994 or 2014
versions was _better_ , though there's sure an implication from how they're
painted.) On the other hand, _access_ to information can produce an adventure,
as well; so can many other things. In the end, the right group of friends can
end up on wild adventures for any number of reasons.

That's leaving aside the implications of having easy access to information to
answer more important questions.

Questions for which there's a known right answer _should_ get resolved as
quickly as possible. That leaves more time for the questions that the Internet
and all the other resources we have available can _help_ answer, but which
still require work. (Whether those questions are useful or just amusingly
absurd is up to you.)

Just look at XKCD's What If ([https://what-if.xkcd.com/](https://what-
if.xkcd.com/)), which references online information but nonetheless puts it
together in novel ways (density of seawater and approximate volume of a
bowling ball gives the minimum weight required for a bowling ball to sink). In
the future, that post ([https://what-if.xkcd.com/125/](https://what-
if.xkcd.com/125/)) will show up on the other end of a very strange set of
search terms, but there will always be many more questions where that came
from, and there are myriad examples online of detailed reasoning from
fictional premises. For instance, see
[http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/](http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/)
, [http://physicswithportals.com/](http://physicswithportals.com/) ,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize)
, or
[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uG3_RgX9JA0/TboU21S9gNI/AAAAAAAAD...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uG3_RgX9JA0/TboU21S9gNI/AAAAAAAAD5w/zkR3VV91S8Y/s1600/6733226c0117931aa6df7c8d3a8e7127.jpg)
.

~~~
lloeki
> _On the other hand, access to information can produce an adventure, as well_

How many of us, solo or in a group, ended up reaching for the asked piece of
information basically instantly on Wikipedia, yet, serendipitously hooked on
by another piece of information, ended up bouncing around page upon page like
a pachinko ball until one says "wait, how did we get up to this already?".

~~~
mosselman
I have planned entire holidays using online information, going to places I'd
never go to otherwise. While on holiday though I prefer travel guides in book
format however.

------
chris_wot
I once tried to find out on Wikipedia whether goldfish really have ten second
attention spans. I learned that in Nix vs. Heddon the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.

~~~
minikites
Also, X-men toys are "toys" not "dolls" because they're non-human. X-men fans
got mad, heh.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States)

~~~
bryanrasmussen
The X-Men are the next step in doll evolution.

------
polarix
I'm struggling to identify what it is about this nostalgia that infuriates me
so deeply. Perhaps it's just fascinating to me that so many people find it fun
to be in stupid situations. I find it barbaric and twisted.

More productively, I wonder how people would respond to this after having
grown up with the boundary of their 30s knowledge horizon roughly equivalent
to that of humanity's experts 10yr prior. Anyone born since ~2000 perhaps is
in this situation. Will they have eliminated this kind of "fun" "bullshit"
from their behavior completely?

~~~
swatow
For me it's the assumption that if since a particular circumstance triggered
an interesting social interaction, that the lack of that circumstance would
mean that no interesting social interaction would occur.

At the base, it's the same hollow critique of millennials: because they do
things differently (e.g. interact socially online as well as in person) they
must be missing out on all the great things that the Boomers experienced.

~~~
Klinky
This looks to be a Gen X story. I am not sure what the Boomers have to do with
this?

------
coldtea
Actually Google (and Wikipedia et al) enabled an even more evolved form of
bullshit.

The kind were people with shallow (or none) knowledge of a topic check some
reference source they half understand and try to pass of as experts in the
subject matter...

At least with reference books you had to own them in the first place and get
into the trouble to locate a reference in their index etc.

Now any bozo can check an obscure lemma in a matter of seconds and pretend he
knows what he's talking about in an online discussion (and often offline),
going back to check more details in the process any time his bluff is close to
be discovered.

~~~
mreiland
While looking at wiki isn't going to make you an expert, basing your opinion
on a wiki article isn't exactly the worst thing in the world to do.

------
crazygringo
I have a rule I always follow, and have convinced many friends of too -- no
Googling/Wikipedia-ing in social settings. If nobody knows something (trivia-
like), it's almost always a lot more fun to continue not knowing.

Sure, look it up when you get home. But a little group self-discipline goes
far in keeping the fine art of bullshitting alive.

(And it's not just the answer that kills the conversation, but also the fact
that someone is right and someone is wrong, game over. Much better to keep the
game going!)

~~~
HCIdivision17
I'm rather shocked at the fairly visceral reactions a lot of people are having
here. This is pretty classic conversational shenanigans. We had a blast with
this in college; either you play along or counter with something equally
preposterous or unprovable. Looking up the answer is cheating. It's like a
game of verbal Calvin Ball or Mornington Crescent. As noted elsewhere in this
thread (edit: at least one level up it seems (I got lost, apparently)), the
goal is to _specifically_ not make it win/lose, since that ends the game and
is _boring_.

Or, if you know your friends well enough to guess what they're going to say,
it's the art of picking the third or fourth dialog choice from the top, Monkey
Island style. And if you're _really_ friends, they'll do the same and it'll
_work_.

And then there was the other side, where you tried to derive the answer. One
of my favorites was attempting to determine if you could neglect the earth's
core in modeling gravity; ferocious debate for an hour and a half by a dozen
engineers. Best lunch ever.

Really, this is more about people being boring. Jumping immediately to the
obvious instead of enjoying a meandering argumentative stroll. It's a way to
play. Simple as that.

Otherwise you're just the adult saying, "that's not lava, that's carpet."
Killjoy is the word, I think.

Edit: Ah, here we go: Mornington Crescent.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjOsOB4erZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjOsOB4erZI)

~~~
maxerickson
I realize you may have omitted some nuance, but to me, "debating" whether you
have to consider the entirety of a mass when modeling gravity sounds
incredibly boring. If you use 9.8 m/s*s you are papering over all the nuance,
and otherwise 2 masses and a distance is pretty obviously fundamental.

Was the real conversation better than that?

~~~
HCIdivision17
Oh, it was a meandering conversation. Really, it revolved around what the
implications were if one neglected the core such that it was a valid premise.
How would you torture a model of the earth to allow a person to compensate for
not bothering to keep track of the core in a model? Gravity is the most
obvious start, which you can get away with some perverse shell geometries
(which has the added benefit of ruining the shape of the planet). And there's
all manner of heat and magnetics (I think we largely assumed those were also
neglectable, which in retrospect is poor planning due to solar wind).

It wandered like that. It was a direct result of our introduction to modeling
in the early core engineering courses. Wherein we abuse the power of deciding
what gets into the model. (It all started with one person noting that we
frequently neglect gravity in electrical engineering.)

------
xianshou
The world, pre-Google, abounded in serendipitous quests to find one piece of
information offline.

The world, post-Google, abounds in serendipitous quests to find many pieces of
information online, such as starting at a given book on Amazon and moving down
the chain of Amazon's "Customers Also Bought", or embarking on a semi-infinite
dive through Wikipedia.

Any of these can turn into a game given the right mindset. Who can connect
Klein bottles to the Gettysburg address in the fewest links?

Of course, that's not to disparage the fun of lacking access to proper
information. Just look at these bodybuilders arguing over the number of days
in a week: [http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/233107/two-body-builders-
arg...](http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/233107/two-body-builders-argue-on-the-
internet-about-how-many-days-are-in-the-week/)

~~~
asifjamil
That bodybuilding.com thread is gold

------
ummonkwatz
The bullshit didn't even have to be believable: "Marilyn Manson was the kid
that played Paul from the Wonder Years. Also, he had a rib removed so he could
perform autofellatio." Kids everywhere believed that. Hilarious.

~~~
cbd1984
Right, like "Vaccines cause autism" and "Homeopathy is something you should
say without laughing". Also hilarious.

There's a dark side to bullshit. There's a side which creates endless pain for
no good reason, because things 'sound good' or are 'too good to check' and
nobody likes a party-pooper, do they? Especially when the party-pooper is
pointing out how this little piece of bullshit could kill someone.

No. Go along to get along. Don't be so serious all the time. Don't imagine you
know better. It's rude.

~~~
xorcist
Yet "vaccines cause autism" has spread like a virus over the Internet. I had
never heard about it before the recent (ten years) memification. It's not like
the recipients google it and go "no it doesn't" because it you really do you
might as well go mad about the insane "facts" put forth. Google and the web in
general probably spread as much bullshit as it kills. It's complicated.

~~~
lione
On those kind of issues, the google results are a bit muddled. You'll get the
results saying "No, of course vaccines don't cause autism", alongside a bunch
of BS articles saying "It totally does, because I had my kid vaccinated once,
and he's autistic!". Unless you actually search through the sources and figure
out which is more credible, it's hard to get a straight yes or no answer.

------
k__
I'm happy that it's over.

My step-dad always posed with his fact-knowledge as if it was the holy grail
of wisdom. It even led to this bullshitting in the link. If he didn't know
something, he made it up. Or he would tell us about some (anecdotical!)
evidence for this and that.

Today, I just flip out my smartphone and look it up and after that, everyone
learned something.

Sometimes the facts are so ridiculous or shocking that knowing the truth can
be funny or exciting too :)

------
noonespecial
Its actually become a fun game around here. Someone makes an outrageous claim
and it starts a race to be the first to call them on it. Phones get drawn like
six-guns and its on! We call this little victory of fact finding the
"fonesnope". (Or "getting fonesnoped" if you happen to be the claimant). Its a
fun party game. Try it.

------
increment_i
As a kid I remember family discussions surrounding the legitimacy of certain
pieces of trivia, often reaching the point where people began trying to shout
over each other. Eventually, my uncle would pick up the phone, dial a random
number and say, "Hi there, you wouldn't happen to know who directed Casablanca
would you?"

------
KaiserPro
Sadly google hasn't killed "the bullshit". The rise of personal/social media
means that we can live in our own bubble of whatever view we choose.

This was exposed quite starkly with this story:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families/health-news/cancer-is-best-death-so-dont-try-to-cure-it-says-
doctor-9952361.html)

If you exclude the pro/cons comments (and the abuse) you're left with loads of
"charities have the cure, they are holding them back"

they defy sense, yet are reassured by the people about them.

------
moultano
I mostly see upsides. Instead of uncertainty about random trivia, the
conversation can be based on certainty about amazing trivia.

Did you know that early South-Americans used the shells of giant turtle-like
mammals as houses? Isn't that crazy? Here, check out a picture of one.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Glyptodon...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Glyptodon_asper_front.JPG)

Or as xkcd put it, you are one of the lucky 10,000!
[http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/)

------
hayksaakian
All that's changed is the bar for creativity.

There are claims which have no proof or disproof on the web.

You have to be more creative in 2015.

------
pervycreeper
Good riddance?

I believe I'm missing some profound point that the TFA is apparently making.

~~~
harshreality
The point is that uncertainty about some things creates social engagement.

~~~
pervycreeper
Well, there are still things to be uncertain about that aren't useless trivia,
factoids, or urban legends. Hopefully the new BS free era will trickle down to
the lower classes, gradually eroding their ignorance and prejudices, at least
about one-liner facts.

~~~
Gatsky
Hopefully this new era will also gradually mitigate lazy generalizations and
atavistic class distinctions.

~~~
pervycreeper
Point taken, but please read for the kernel of truth that remains after all
the nits have been picked off.

------
nl
Drop bears are a carnivorous, highly aggressive cousin of the Koala.

1) Koalas are from Australia, and in Australia every animal tries to kill you.

2) The _AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM_ [1] has an entire page on them[2].

3) Australian Geographic (the Australian cousin of National Geographic) has a
long post about how they tend to target non-native homo-sapiens[3]

4) This study[4] shows how they are best tracked by indirect means. PDF
available at [5]

[1] [http://australianmuseum.net.au/](http://australianmuseum.net.au/)

[2] [http://australianmuseum.net.au/Drop-
Bear](http://australianmuseum.net.au/Drop-Bear)

[3] [http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/03/drop-
bea...](http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/03/drop-bears-target-
tourists,-study-says/)

[4]
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2012.731...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2012.731307#.VLp3DIqUfCI)

[5]
[http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16293/1/2013_Janssen_APAS2013_pro...](http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16293/1/2013_Janssen_APAS2013_proceedings_version.pdf)

------
uniclaude
For those looking for never ending talks and debates about what is true or
not, we still have philosophy, religion, and of course politics. Moreover,
there's a lot of room the "The Fine Art of Bullshit" there.

~~~
stolio
Those are divisive topics, those are debates _that matter_.

For increased social cohesion play-fighting over bullshit is better, there's a
subtext that the only reason it's worth it is you actually enjoy the company
of those around you.

------
robobro
Funnily enough, the Guinness Book of World Records started for a similar
reason, settling barroom trivia bets

------
IvyMike
Comedian Pete Holmes' take on this from a few years ago:

[http://youtu.be/PQ4o1N4ksyQ](http://youtu.be/PQ4o1N4ksyQ)

~~~
jcr
"It's like having a drunk know-it-all in your pocket."

Hilarious. We're not quite there yet, but soon though. Just wait until we go
from predictive search to preemptive search.

------
mrweasel
Bullshit hasn't gone anywhere, sadly. Politicians, the media, companies and
people in general spew out more bullshit than ever before, despite the fact
that we have easier access to facts than ever before.

No one care to check: "it's in the news, so it must be true". Or the
alternative, we assume it's all bullshit, even when it's not.

It often seems that we don't care if somethings is bullshit. If it appeals to
us we don't want to run the risk of being proven wrong. If we don't like the
bullshit that's coming our way there's no point in proving it wrong, because
"everyone knows that it's bullshit".

------
everyone
You can still bullshit. You just cant do it by inventing random easily
unverified factoids. You need to be a bit more inventive and creative these
days.

~~~
pistle
9/11 was an inside job.

------
stana
Not only bullshit. I remember in one of the Beatles interviews how early on
they found out that some guy in town knew the B7 guitar chord. They would get
on a bus to meet this guy to learn the chord. This journey would not exist
today :(

~~~
juliangregorian
Smells fishy to me. I could figure out B7 in like, a minute, and I'm not a
good guitarist at all.

------
yzzxy
_why wrote about this phenomenon in CLOSURE:

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5764687/CLOSURE.pdf](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5764687/CLOSURE.pdf)

The segment in question runs from about page 29 through 34.

    
    
        I unfolded my napkin and got the silverware out. "I don't remember."
        She got out her phone.
        "No, don't go there."
        "I. M. D. B." Her fingers.
        "Oh, Cristian Douglas," I said. "It was Cristian Douglas."
        Still typing, head leaned back, under the spell of her phone.

------
Alex_Jiang
If anything google made all types of bullshit more accessible. Just search for
articles about: Non-stick pans, chem-trails, hollow-earth theory, etc. etc.

~~~
puredemo
What is the bullshit associated with non-stick pans? The off-gassing when they
heat up to much?

------
meesterdude
I found myself thinking "the fine art of bullshit, as told by a bullshitter"
while reading this article. I was annoyed because there is no subheading or
useful intro that tells me what this is about so i can decide if I want to
read it or not. Just a vague title and a vague picture. The writer might think
this is clever -- I think its misplaced.

------
drawkbox
There was a comedian that talked about this a couple years ago.

The old 'Swear to God' that would prove any piece of fine BS to your friends,
is no longer valid. Swear to Google is the new 'believe me'.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVxOLew_cU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVxOLew_cU)
(towards the end).

------
anigbrowl
Read any newspaper article on global warming - the comments section is
guaranteed to contain humongous amounts of bullshit. Actually, the comments
section on just about any news article is guaranteed to contain humongous
amounts of bullshit.

OK, it's not really the fun entertaining sort of bullshit, but you've got to
take what you can get.

------
teddyh
“ _What did we do before Google?_ ”

“ _We wondered about stupid stuff all day until we forgot about it._ ”

[http://www.absurdnotions.org/an20031223.gif](http://www.absurdnotions.org/an20031223.gif)

(From
[http://www.absurdnotions.org/page112.html](http://www.absurdnotions.org/page112.html))

------
gsam
Now known as the finer art of bullshit.

------
lotsofmangos
Given the plethora of competing bullshit-castles being constructed online, a
google search could easily end with them believing that Steven Tyler and Mary
Tyler Moore are not only brother and sister, but are also secret agents of the
Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.

------
bussiere
Except if you find a conspiracy website that say that they are, and your
friend will tell you that's a conspiracy and THEY are sibling. That's juste
what they want you to believe.

Here in france we have a lot of people that believe theses websites

------
rey12rey
This art is well and truly alive in football(soccer) pubs today, at least in
the 10+ ones I frequent on occasion. No one there respects stats or facts or
whatever. Everyone is always right.

------
LargeCompanies
Holy moly, the Internet thrives on bullshit.

You best not believe much you see on the Internet! So much crap is made up and
goes viral for surprise the almighty dollar.

------
swang
"Oh great, now we don't have a reason to go out"... SAID NO ONE EVER.

------
Jugurtha
Cool narrative :)

------
user02
This is stupid, you're all stupid.

------
ciupicri
If he wants to engage people he should switch to trolling.

~~~
Evolved
Trolls are what folks in my day used to call assholes. Trolling isn't just
joking with your buddies about something innocuous. It has become an excuse
for just being a jerk to people and hoping they don't pop you in the nose. On
the other hand there are genuine good pranksters whose craft is finely honed
and deserving of appreciation.

~~~
ciupicri
Of course that in this context it's the latter just as anigbrowl's comment
proves.

