Tag: bullshit
“For the bullshitter, it doesn’t really matter if he is right or wrong. What matters is that you’re paying attention.” The proximity of that sentiment to the Deepak Chopra references further on did not go unnoticed. But he’s a sideshow to the real danger of the anti-vaxxer scourge. [c/o LinkMachineGo] #link
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From an interview with philosopher Stephen Law in New Scientist on his new book, Believing Bullshit:
Some things may be beyond our understanding, and sometimes it’s reasonable to appeal to mystery. If you have excellent evidence that water boils at 100°C, but on one occasion it appeared it didn’t, it’s reasonable to attribute that to some mysterious, unknown factor. It’s also reasonable, when we have a theory that works but we don’t know how it works, to say that this is currently a mystery. But the more we rely on mystery to get us out of intellectual trouble, or the more we use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts, the more vulnerable we are to deceit, by others and by ourselves.
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