Alex

“Being able to spot bullshit based on data is a critical skill. Decades ago, fancy language and superfluous detail might have served a bullshitter’s needs. Today, we are accustomed to receiving information in quantitative form, but hesitant to question that information once we receive it. Quantitative evidence generally seems to carry more weight than qualitative arguments. This weight is largely undeserved—only modest skill is required to construct specious quantitative arguments. But we defer to such arguments nonetheless. Consequently, numbers offer the biggest bang for the bullshitting buck.”
― Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

“The bleak fields are asleep, My heart alone wakes; The evening in the harbour Down his red sails takes. Night, guardian of dreams, Now wanders through the land; The moon, a lily white, Blossoms within her hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems

“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

“It all makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche’s initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years