Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over | Hacker News Reader

Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over

journals.sagepub.com

45 pointsvo2maxer12 comments

Very well written, with some excellent tongue-in-cheek humour.

I love this quote: “One informant told Jackall that his job involved ‘characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters . . . Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game’ (Jackall, 1986, p. 145). A crucial aspect was not using too much or too little bullshit, and also being able to judge the appropriate moment to bullshit. Competent bullshitters also needed to become competent audience members for performances of bullshit. They had to learn that bullshit should not be taken too seriously and it should be engaged with in just the right way. If you took bullshit too seriously, you ran the risk of being seen as a chump. Likewise, if you challenged bullshit too frequently, you risked being seen as an asshole.”

This describes the Mindfullness meditation movement accurately. They are frauds with a mental toy that latches onto people with anxiety, for profit.

I dont understand this comment, please elaborate. I've found meditation and the like helpful, haven't paid a dime to anyone for it and so am confused.

Meditation itself is great and I'm a practitioner myself. But my experience watching the growth of Mindfullness has been observing a series of over reaching claims, each being addressed by some book, seminar, or class "solving" the issue for a price. Some higher anxiety, over worked friends have been sucked into these social circles and milked for all kinds of expensive books, seminars, lectures, sessions, and what ever other made up term for that specialized form of theater that costs far more than a movie ticket.

Sufficiently advanced talk about bullshit is indistinguishable from bullshit.

Exactly. As one's bullshit meta-knowledge increases, the precise jargon required to distinguish between higher and lower level's of bullshit, and the relative meaning topology between bullshit in overlapping social contexts, will eventually sound like actual bullshit to the pre-initiate bullshit novice.

I think I stated all that with proper precision.

Bullshit Jobs: A Conversation with David Graeber

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/07/04/bullshit-jobs-a-co...

Conceptual entrepreneurs almost sounds like a good thing. Bullshit is a lie with an ideological bent.

"Conceptual entrepreneurs" might describe most conspiracy theorists.

Hypothetical billionaires and conceptual entrepreneurs are potentially good candidates for the president seat.

At first glance this looks like a joke

However it holds certain degrees of reality behind the humors

It is one good way to bring up an unquantifiable yet risky problem to people's awareness

Did you follow the references to other papers? It seems to be well researched, and much of the information seems to resonate with my own experience.

I wish I could learn the technique through a course or something because I have seen how valuable the skill is.

I mostly skimmed the article, but in my experience I have seen some excellent bullshitters have high social status. I can recall two CEOs (one guy, one woman) with glib tongues: he is smart and successful, and I never understood the woman (but she cycled through multiple companies so she had external validation).

Another female friend bullshits successfully at work and within her peer group. My friend doesn’t use bullshit words but instead there’s a kind of Teflon irrelevancy to a lot of what she says (she is also well smart, with an intuition that works).

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