Alex

“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

“The US postal system processes half a billion pieces of mail every single day. It’s a staggering number. If all seven billion people on the planet sent a letter or package, the postal service could process them all in a fortnight.”
― Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

“The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules