Yes, bullshit, like any kind of manure, is good fertilizer for the growth of the new.
Frankfurt explores why there’s been an explosion in bullshit in recent decades in his essay. My own simple explanation is that capacity to store, transmit and process information has expanded far faster than our capacity to generate it. Bullshit is almost like a placeholder for the real thing, like fake datasets used to test the development of a software system before it can be populated with real data. Certain chicken-and-egg relationship there.
That’s the system-theoretic explanation (at global level, variety of composite system exceeds dimensionality of data circulating in it, necessitating the production of bullshit to bootstrap the system). At the social and cultural level, bullshit is the currency of non-production, which is coincidentally high when a system is being displaced by a new one, since lots of people are struggling to transition.
One way to think of this is that impending vast changes ephemaralize the old before they replace them. So the signal of the old becomes the test-bullshit of the new.by VENKAT at www.ribbonfarm.com
and this too,
I’m afraid your definition of “Information” is bullshit.
Data can never be compared with reality — data can only be compared with other data.
Do you have a proposed alt definition?
How about a nice recursive definition:
“Data whose truth value survives comparison with all other known information.”
