Hyperactive BS detectors
Posted on Apr 29th, 2007
by 
Brian
Brian
~C4 just pointed me to this brilliant post by Dean Radin:
--> read it all.
HABS syndrome
I enjoyed this remark from an article about the author Kingsley Amis in The New Yorker (April 23, 2007), by Adam Gopnik:
It is a very good thing to have a built-in bullshit detector, but a bad thing when the bullshit detector crowds out the rest of your brain; that's why they call it being narrow-minded. You quickly reach the stage where anything ambitious, complicated, or merely foreign gets spat on along with the things that are genuinely phoney.I'd add to this that those with HABS (hyperactive BS) syndrome, including cynics who proudly belong to "skeptics" societies, -- which revel in the presumed stupidity of others who don't belong to the club -- tend to reflexively spit on anything they regard as unorthodox or anomalous, including claims of psi experiences and experiments supporting those claims.
--> read it all.
Access: Public
bs detectors
June 2008
HAH! That’s going to be a common meme very shortly, one can be sure.
“Dude, what’s the 411 on that jerk?”
“Ah, man, he’s just got HABS.”
“Dude, that’s like not whatsoever bomb.”
“Totally.”
bri, this is very cool (hee, hee…i hyperlinked you on your own blog…whee!). :)
axiom: your commentary is absolutely hilarious…”like not whatsoever the bomb!” ROFLMAO!
:)
hehehehehehehe to both of you!
Oh very very good.
I suspect I've secretly ( ahem, not so secretly ) prided myself on having a bullshit detector. Of course, the kind of shit that my detector detects is wholly predicated on my own conditioned, limited and potentially bullshitty point of view. <<sigh>>.
In the meantime… I'd like to leave you with this fabulous little interview with the philosopher Harry Frankfurt about his paper ”On Bullshit”.
- what I got from him is that when we have an agenda - particularly one which
isn't exactly upfront - (e.g. to sell ourselves, or to sell our ideas or…), we tend to do what he calls “bullshit”. It's not the same as lying, and Frankfurt makes this distinction very well.
”On Bullshit” has to be the best title I've read in awhile. :)
downloading now. :)