Calling Bullshit

Bullshit everywhere

 Bullshit is not a modern invention

o Euthydemus – Plato complains that the philosophers known as ‘sophists’ are indifferent
to what is actually true and are interested only interested in winning arguments.
o Therefore, sophists are bullshit artists.
 Bullshit has its origins in deception more broadly, and animals have been deceiving one another
for hundreds of millions of years
 Cheating crustaceans and devious ravens
o Mantis shrimp
 Spring loading mechanism in its large claws to destroy the shell of marine snails
– those claws travel by 50 mph speed!
 Waves those large claws in a fierce display demonstrating its size and challenging
opponent
 It also has an Achilles’ heel
 Requirement to molt (mostly vulnerable during that time)
 Take more than their share of abuse (get hurt on purpose for some
reason but it is deserved and you are on with that)
 Even during the time of molting these creatures wave their claws – an
empty threat – but intruders knowing the power of the fierce punch are
reluctant to call the bluff (challenge someone to carry out a stated
intention, in the expectation of being able to expose it as a pretense)

{bluff: an attempt to deceive someone into believing that one can or is

going to do something.}

 This is not so sophisticated bullshit – these creatures don’t think up and

decide to carry out. It’s merely an evolved process.
 Sophisticated bullshitter needs
 A theory of mind (he/she needs to put her/himself in the place of
his/her mark) {put yourself in your place: to imagine how someone else
feels in a difficult situation}
 Should be able to imagine think about what the others around her do
and do not know
 Should be able to imagine what impression will be created by what sort
of bullshit – and to choose her bullshit accordingly
 This advanced cognition is rare in animal kingdom (except for humans and our
closest primates – chimpanzees and gorillas), but very different family does –
Corvidae
o Ravens/Crows/Jays
 Remarkably intelligent birds
  They manufacture the most sophisticated tools of any nonhuman species
(Aesop’s fable about crow putting pebbles into a urn to raise the water level)
 Ravens can plan ahead of the future, select objects that may be useful to them
later
 Crows can recognize human faces and hold grudges against – can even pass
these grudges along fellow crows
 Ravens may have evolved alongside pack-hunting species such as wolves and
ourselves
 They are excellent at tricking mammals out of their food
 Most corvid species cache their food
 If another bird sees someone caching the food the observer might steal it
 When being watched, ravens
 Quick cache or
 Fake cache
 Why do ravens fake cache?
 Whether it thinks about the impression its fakery will create in the mind
of the onlooker
 Or is it just a simple instinctive rule of thumb ‘cache only when no other
ravens are around’
 {full-on bullshit is intended to distract, confuse or mislead – bullshitter
needs to have a mental model of the effect that his effects have on the
observer’s mind}
 It was found that ravens do have a theory of mind
o When caching treats, they do think what other ravens know
o And not only do ravens act to deceive other birds sitting right
Infront of them, they recognize that there might be other birds
out there, unseen, who can be deceived as well. {Exactly what
we do when bullshitting on the Internet – we don’t see anyone
out there, but we hope and expect that our words will reach an
audience.}
o Humans
 We take bullshit to the next level
 Similarities with ravens
 Theory of mind is there
 We can think in advance how others will interpret our actions – we use
that skill to our advantage
 What we have ravens don’t
 Rich system of language to deploy
 Human language is immensely expressive
 Together, language and theory of mind allow us to convey a broad range of
messages and to model in our own minds what effects our messages will have
on those who hear them. This is a good skill to have when trying to
communicate efficiently – and it’s equally useful when using communication to
manipulate another person’s beliefs or actions.
  by paying attention to communication, you are giving other people a ‘handle’
they can use to manipulate your behavior
 animals with limited communication systems have few different alarm calls –
few different handles – with which they can manipulate.
 Capuchin monkeys
 warn others by alarm calls and save many lives
 also, lower rank monkeys use fake alarm calls to scare dominant
individuals away from precious food
 A capuchin monkey can tell me to flee, even if doing so is not in my best interest.
But it can’t, say, convince me that it totally has a girlfriend in Canada; I’ve just
never met her. Never mind getting me to transfer $10,000 into a bank account
belonging to the widow of a mining tycoon, who just happened to ask out of the
blue for my help laundering her fortune into US currency.
 Why bullshit is everywhere
o Everyone is trying to sell you something
o Humans possess the cognitive tools to figure out what kind of bullshit will be effective
o Our complex language allows us to produce infinite variety of bullshit.