I've been thinking recently about bullshit (as you might have seen in my last article, Talking Shit. While I think it was an excellent article, I get the impression that it still doesn't quite answer the question of why the stuff is so prevalent. Unfortunately, the last few weeks have answered that question: we want it, and we're complicit in spreading it.
It's not just that we as a society can't distinguish bullshit from truth (though we often can't), and it's not that we as a society generate bullshit because we can't find a way to avoid it (though we do that too). No, we actively like and enjoy the bullshit we consume. A lot of the time, we even put significant effort into propagating and spreading the bullshit, and getting other people to be dependent on it. We are, in fact, all addicted to bullshit.
The usual working definition of addiction in the wider sense is that it's a condition that involves compulsively doing something, whether it's a substance or another activity, despite that activity having significant negative and harmful consequences. Now, there are debates about the usefulness of this definition and whether or not it's really applicable to things like gaming, internet use or pornography, but that's not strictly relevant to us. What is relevant, however, is that the production and consumption of bullshit in this society of ours follows this definition to a tee. Bullshit does real damage. It costs people unbelievable amounts of money, rots all our brains, makes it nigh-impossible to actually get hold of useful information when you need it and in the worst cases, leads to serious political destabilisation and people getting killed. It is dangerous. And yet, despite all this, we keep producing it and we keep consuming it, and some of us are so attached to it that when someone tries to take it away from us, we will fight tooth and nail and say and do the vilest things in order to not be detached from our precious, precious bullshit.
Writing about this well has been tricky. My approach has been to choose a few case studies of situations where people seem to develop a strong attachment to false or unfactual information, then discuss the harms involved and why they're well-explained by an addiction model.
Anti woke pronouns
Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn may have seen me kinda go for the throat of a recruiter who made a deliberate effort to advertise himself as being "anti woke pronouns" in his LinkedIn bio. While that was probably a little counterproductive on my part, it does illustrate my point about bullshit addiction quite neatly. The person in question has almost certainly never met a trans person, has no personal stake in the well-being of trans people and honestly probably just doesn't have to interact with us if he doesn't have to. Why the hell is he so obsessed about trans people? On the day I wrote this article, the New Zealand Herald's headline was about New Zealand prescribing puberty blockers at seven times the rate that the UK does. Setting aside that the UK, the place that is jokingly referred to as "TERF Island" on the trans internet, is doing everything it can to make the medical system as hostile to trans people as possible, why the fuck is this headline news?
Taking the broadest possible definition, trans and otherwise gender-nonconforming people make up maybe 3-5% of the population: a more conservative estimate might be 0.5-1% of the population. There just aren't that many of us out there, and there certainly aren't enough of us to justify the level of outrage that is so often directed at us. The number of trans children actively receiving any kind of gender affirming treatment is tiny: about four hundred teenagers in New Zealand are being prescribed puberty blockers out of an eligible population of just shy of a million. Moreover, a significant number of these prescriptions are for cis children experiencing precocious puberty: you know, the condition that puberty blockers were designed to treat, and that has been increasing in prevalence significantly in the last ten years. In short, this is a deeply uncommon issue, and in any reasonable world, we would not be constantly obsessing about puberty blockers in the media. This is, to be blunt, not what we're observing.
Instead of a reasonable response, we're getting a tidal wave of pearl-clutching articles in the media and on social networks about puberty blockers and gender-affirming treatment in youth. A very few people with disproportionate media influence are creating a moral panic about cis children being forced into being trans against their will or causing "irreversible damage to themselves", and trans people of all ages are suffering as a consequence. The worst of it is that the vast bulk of what's being said simply isn't true and has been debunked time and time again, but this doesn't stop the culprits from repeating their shit and piling calumny after calumny on anyone who challenges it. Moreover, when we point out the actual scale of young people transitioning, and ask whether this deserves the level of attention we see being thrown at it, we're essentially accused of being demons.
Notably, it isn't just trans people that get hurt by this shit. The people who are the loudest about the evils of trans people do massive damage to themselves. Just look at notable TERF JK Rowling, primarily famous for being massively hostile to trans people on Twitter and whom I'm told might also have written some children's books at some point. She's isolated herself from the vast majority of people around her and her only friends these days seem to be people who are just as rabidly transphobic as she is. All her billions of dollars can't get people to agree with her or spend time with her, and even people who agree with her on transphobia don't want to associate with her because of just how obsessive she is about it. This is observably compulsive behaviour that has serious negative effects both on Rowling and on other people: sounds an awful lot like an addiction, doesn't it?
So, why do it? Quite obviously, it feels good. Being able to hate people while feeling virtuous and as though you're doing the right thing is a powerfully intoxicating feeling. And anger is intoxicating in and of itself. This can be a good thing: if I wasn't angry, I don't think this blog would exist. It does, however, make you vulnerable to manipulation. After all, if anger feels good, you will tend to seek out media that makes you angry. This isn't necessarily always media that's accurate, as such, but with anger and the willingness to hate being such a powerful emotive hook, it will be seen as such. And so the facts you take on board start becoming distorted. You consume more and more emotive media, and while you probably won't consciously not care whether it's true or not, you won't be paying attention to obvious falsehoods. And so, eventually, you find yourself irrevocably wedded to your supply of outrage, no matter how accurate it is or what damage it does to people.
Palestine
Of course, this isn't just a right-wing phenomenon, and recent activism around Palestine shows that quite clearly. While Bibi Netanyahu obviously belongs in the Hague and I personally would really like the IDF to stop bombing the shit out of Gaza, the way a lot of people in the anglosphere are approaching this crisis is more than a little disturbing.
One thing that's striking is the intensity of the focus on Gaza at the exclusion of all else. It's not uncommon to see quotes on social media saying, in essence, "from now on, everything you think about or do should be about Gaza". First off, what the hell? Members of my hapuu (as an aside, I really have to thank Te Reo Maaori for giving me a word to describe people who sit between "family" and "my people/culture" in my view of the world) are literally being bombed by Russia as we speak, and I think I deserve the right to think about that. Secondly, it's not as though most of the people posting this are short of problems in their own backyards: problems that they're usually much better positioned to fix. I'm certainly much better positioned to influence my local politics viz. immigrants or our First Nations people than I am to influence middle eastern geopolitics, and the same goes for my involvement in the war in Ukraine. But those aren't the big issues. By contrast, the big issue is the kind of tunnel vision that this invokes. Gaza is the only thing that matters. Anything is acceptable in the service of Gaza. If you think about something other than Gaza, you are a bad person, but if Gaza is all you think about, you are a good person, no matter what you do or how you behave. You just have to believe and ignore anything that might muddy the waters.
The flip side of this is the fact that people that are doing the "right things" for Gaza enjoy effective immunity to criticism. This starts with the way people call themselves "anti-genocide activists" when talking about Gaza. Yes, being against genocide is absolutely a good thing, and while I tend to use a more conservative definition of genocide in my personal work, a wider definition of genocide can definitely include current Israeli policy in Gaza. That said, calling yourself an anti-genocide activist implicitly positions anyone opposing you as being pro-genocide. First off, this is a vile calumny. I genuinely don't think that even the majority of Israelis actually enjoy or seeing Palestinians getting blown up, let alone people who don't post enough about Gaza on Twitter. Secondly, if you think everyone who opposed you is pro-genocide, how the hell are you going to tell when you've fucked up? And you are going to fuck up: humans are limited, fallible and far from omniscient, and even if you mean well, you might overstep and say or do something bigoted or, heaven forfend, even anti-semitic. When that happens, you need to be able to listen and correct course, and being utterly convinced in the rightness of your cause and outrage gets in the way of that really badly. The pattern is the same as JK Rowling: you start off by saying something that's accidentally offensive or hurtful, and rather than correcting course you start to see the people who corrected you as an enemy. This spirals, and before too long, you find yourself with bigots as your only friends and compatriots: a sad state of affairs, and once again, an indication of addictive patterns.
The harms of this aren't even that abstract. I personally know of a few people who've been scammed out of several thousand dollars by scammers posing as Gazans, and by all accounts these were not isolated occurrences that I was simply unlucky enough to encounter. The idea that supporting Gaza is a fast-track path to being morally good is deeply damaging: sure, it's a morally good act, but what is being claimed in our media (both social and otherwise) goes far beyond that, to the point where supporting Gaza basically seems to be equivalent to a plenary indulgence, allowing people to be shitty in whatever way they want and have the sin of that be absolved. And we all know how I feel about indulgences. Beyond that, as we've seen, it makes people distressingly easy to fool. The guilt of potentially not helping as much as you could, coupled with the rush of good feeling that comes with feeling like you're helping makes it very easy to be taken advantage of. And I'm not OK with that. I'm not OK with scammers preying on the vulnerable. I don't even much care if people argue that the scam victims are acceptable collateral damage if it encourages more people to help Gaza. If you excuse dishonesty in one place, you excuse it everywhere.
The political effects are even worse. In encouraging a single-minded focus on Gaza, we've essentially given carte blanche to every petty antisemite out there to say whatever shit they like: after all, anything's acceptable in pursuit of supporting Gaza, isn't it? And my word, there are a lot of anti-semites out there. What's worse is that, given that we're expected to ignore or minimise the existence of this trend, and coupled with the anger-intoxication dynamic discussed in the last section, it's depressingly easy for well-meaning people to unconsciously absorb antisemitic ideas. And before you know it, you find yourself quoting directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on LinkedIn and expecting us to find it very progressive and uplifting. I've not even gotten into the violently hostile reactions that occur when you try and take people's inchoate outrage away from them: honestly, I'm even a little worried about writing this, despite my pro-Palestine credentials being fucking impeccable (come on, who else can say that Sean Plunket and Jordan Peterson called them a terrorist on a national radio station over a Palestine Liberation protest?).
And then, of course, there are the wumao.
Wumao
In the last two situations, we've discussed relatively organic instances of bullshit and outrage addiction: ones that have arisen/come to pass on their own account. Unfortunately, organic bullshit isn't the worst kind, and it isn't even the most harmful. It's an open secret that various revisionist powers, among them Russia and the PRC, engage in considerable amounts of astroturfing on social media. A large proportion of posts and comments on social media, particularly about politically charged topics like both of the ones described above, are simply manufactured in order to sow dissent and instability. The pattern is very similar everywhere: the manufactured messaging tends to encourage more extreme and uncompromising positions at the expense of ones that are more moderate or at least easier to integrate into wider society. They also tend to encourage feelings of anger, fear or hopelessness in their audiences, which as we've already established, are borderline addictive emotions.
Now, I'm no enemy to views that might be seen as radical or extreme: I have a bunch of them myself. But they should be organically generated, not given to people by authoritarian foreign powers. Organically generated radical views tend to actually aim at problems: even if the solution isn't very good, they describe problems that we actually have and actually need to solve, and we can iterate on them to come up with solutions. Radical views introduced from elsewhere, by contrast, can feel a lot more compelling than organic ones (largely because they're designed specifically to get into those emotional hooks), but very often don't address actual issues faced by actual people. They thus waste time and effort, create unnecessary conflict and often outcompete radical views that are more organic and more representative of our actual struggles. And the harms are real: from astroturfing encouraging people not to vote in the upcoming US election because both candidates are complicit in genocide (technically true, but massively misrepresenting the actual situation), to completely fabricated stories about trans people pushing people further and further towards fascism, the outrage leads to people treating each other badly and making some pretty horrible decisions. This hurts both the people victimised by the bullshit and the people who absorb it: it seems, as we've seen above, to turn them into weird, angry people who are difficult to deal with or be around for long periods of time.
The issue is that, despite how harmful these manufactured ideas are, they still spread, because of the addictive nature of them that we discussed earlier. Moreover, crafted messages can be more potent than organic ones by several orders of magnitude: after all, deliberately engineering a talking point to spread and cause damage means that you don't have to believe the message you craft, which gives you that much more freedom of action. You can also test and iterate on messages much more effectively than people who actually believe what they say can. And so, unfortunately, despite the damage that these messages cause, our addicts still seek them out and spread them organically. And Putin and Xi celebrate as the political situation in the countries targeted goes down the shitty. Fortunately, until recently people still had to write these messages manually, which put a limit on the amount of damage done. Unfortunately, Sam Altman happened.
AI
This was originally meant to be an article about generative AI. Unfortunately, I really don't have the spoons to explain why the addiction model applies in detail. Suffice to say that everything I've described above applies perfectly well to the AI hype train, and that, given that the generation of nice-sounding bullshit is the one thing that generative AI is good at, the prevalence of these language models is going to make all the problems described above unbelievably worse in every way you can think of.
Kicking the habit
So, bullshit is addictive. Outrage is addictive. Moral panics are addictive. And by and large, the vast majority of us are addicted to them in ways that are deeply destructive to ourselves and others. How do we kick the habit?
Looking at the people who seem to be most vulnerable to outrage and bullshit addiction, a common theme seems to be that they have an extremely low tolerance for emotional distress. A healthy person is usually capable of sitting with an unpleasant feeling, such as sadness, grief or guilt, without necessarily having to get rid of it immediately. Sure, the feelings are unpleasant and sometimes mean that you have to reassess your image of yourself and change, but healthy people will be able to sit with unpleasant feelings and learn from them, even if, as is often the case, it takes more work than we'd like. Some people, however, simply cannot tolerate negative emotions for any length of time: as soon as they start feeling something negative, they will do everything they possibly can to stop feeling that way. Often enough, this works, but it also precludes being able to learn from negative experiences in any meaningful way. Bullshit can exploit this vulnerability in two ways: firstly, anger or righteous indignation can mask uncomfortable emotions or substitute for them quite easily, so if someone's looking to avoid uncomfortable emotions, it can be very easy for them to latch on to some bullshit and then just not let go. Secondly, the right kind of bullshit can make the inability to assess feelings or learn from them into a virtue, keeping people locked into a loop of never having to experience negative emotions about themselves or their thoughts, at the expense of harm to themselves and others.
Still, this does suggest one thing that might help with bullshit addiction: developing a tolerance for distressing feelings. One usual way to do this is through the practice of meditation, and this does work, as I can attest. However, this is also a lot of work, and I somehow don't think we're going to be able to get the majority of the population to dedicate a year or more of their life to consistently sitting zazen. And the equivalent christian traditions are not an improvement here. Still, being able to detect when you're getting angry and responding appropriately are very useful skills for kicking a bullshit addiction, and are well worth developing.
Similarly, media literacy is a useful skill to learn: being able to pull apart a text and identify when it's trying to do and whether it's trying to make you feel angry, hopeless or complacent is very important. Unfortunately, this skill only really comes from experience close-reading texts, and is, if anything, even harder to develop than mindfulness. It could work quite well in conjunction with mindfulness training, but at this point, you're essentially committing yourself to a weird kind of monasticism: not necessarily a bad thing, and I think that quite a few tech people are already halfway there, but it might be a bit of a hard sell.
As much as I'm loathe to admit it, the Elizier Yudkovsky/Scott Alexander rationalist crowd do seem to have inoculated themselves against this kind of shit to an extent: they do seem capable of updating beliefs, not believing in things just because they want them to be true and generally falling into outrage addiction. And that's a good thing on the whole. Unfortunately, I don't think I can recommend their approach, because it seems to lead to a completely different collection of harms: the idea that value-free reasoning and debate can lead to things being better politically. Rationalism, in this context, feels a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous: sure you might have stopped drinking, but now you're in a borderline cult, which isn't necessarily an improvement. I'm not sure that calmly and bloodlessly debating race science and eugenics is actually an improvement over mainlining internet outrage, for example.
Conclusion
This has proved to be a rambling and not very cohesive post, and is thus quite hard to conclude. I think all I can really say is that as much as it might be hard, not being addicted to bullshit and outrage is a very good thing. It improves your personal relationships and your mental health, positions you better to help other people and just generally makes life seem that much brighter.