Alex

“There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Cohen suggests a test for unclarity: If you can negate a sentence and its meaning doesn’t change, it’s bullshit. “Shakespeare’s Prospero is ultimately the fulcrum of an epistemic tragedy, precisely because of his failure to embrace the hermeneutics of the transfinite.”
― Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

“While he has not written about bullshit directly, the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has had a formative effect on our thinking about how people bullshit their audiences. Latour looks at the power dynamics between an author and a reader. In Latour’s worldview, a primary objective of nonfiction authors is to appear authoritative. One good way to do this is to be correct, but that is neither necessary nor sufficient. Correct or not, an author can adopt a number of tactics to make her claims unassailable by her readers—who in turn strive not to be duped. For example, the author can line up a phalanx of allies by citing other writers who support her point, or whose work she builds upon. If you question me, she implies, you have to question all of us. She can also deploy sophisticated jargon. Jargon may facilitate technical communication within a field, but it also serves to exclude those who have not been initiated into the inner circle of a discipline.”
― Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

“The grave is without egg.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters