Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

We both just attended an event in Florida.

Agnes:

The event was a conference, just, you know, not to leave the art hanging.

Robin:

Right. And on the demand for bullshit was the topic.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Which wasn't formally defined for us. And there was a pretty wide range of talks. So I guess, in effect, there was a wide range of effective definitions of the word, given that nobody really complained about anybody else's usage or the appropriateness of their talk for the event.

Agnes:

I think the conference wasn't really exactly about bullshit. It was like, why is public discourse so messed up? It was a little more about that. And so the question of defining bullshit was a little bit in the But it was not in the background of my head as I was listening to the talks. I was thinking to myself, huh, what is bullshit? And over the course of listening to some of the talks and sort of disagreeing with some of them, I came up with the definition of bullshit. So the first thing that I, first realization that I had is that when we say, when we describe something that someone else says as bullshit, We're generally insulting it and we rarely apply that to ourselves. And that use of bullshit is sort of parasitic on another more central case where we would apply it to ourselves, namely the practice of bullshitting. That is, sometimes people get together to shoot the shit or just like bullshit together And I think we can sort of understand what that means, what that practice is. And then the kind of bullshit at stake in the conference, which is always something someone else is doing, is never something you're doing in the kind of public discourse sense. It's always the public discourse that other people are creating that's bullshit. In that sense, it's parasitic on the bullshitting activity where you would self-ascribe that you're bullshitting. So what is the bullshitting? The practice. I think it is a tacit agreement to relaxed epistemic standards in the context of the conversation. So it's like we implicitly contract that we're not going to challenge each other very hard. We're not going to ask for evidence. We're not going to bring up conflicting evidence. We're not going to ask for explanations. We're not going to ask for a lot of details because we're letting each other bullshit. Okay, so that's my understanding of what bullshitting is. It's a form of conversation with relaxed epistemic standards, where those are mutually agreed to in an implicit way by the participants. Now, I think when we call things bullshit, like in public discourse, we're basically doing that by saying, what we mean is that the other person the person who we say is bullshitting is doing that thing, that thing that's part of the practice, except in a context where it's not welcome, where we haven't agreed to those relaxed epistemic standards.

Robin:

Right. So the definition I had taken from the previous literature and used in the introduction of my talk doesn't seem greatly at odds with yours, but you could decide how much it is. I focused on the idea that in communication, we have many channels of communication, body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, metaphors, et cetera. And that the literal meaning of words is typically only a small fraction of that overall bandwidth of communication. And that sometimes we are in a state where the literal meaning of the words is not expected or treated as a large fraction of the communication. And therefore, if it's not exactly literally right, it doesn't bother us that much, perhaps, if we are accepting it. That is, there are just modes of communication where the literal words are not front-centered and maybe somewhat at odds with the other channels and that can be okay or not okay. And then the interesting dispute is when people want to accuse other people of illicitly being in that mode or being in a mode way that they don't approve, which then raises standards. Well, when, how much should the literal meanings of the words typically, you know, how much of the communication should that carry? How precisely should that be consistent with the things said through the other channels? What is the appropriate place for precisely attending to the literal meaning of words and imposing strong epistemic standards on those literal words?

Agnes:

You just smooshed two things together there at the end that are just not the same. So I think our definitions are not the same. That is, attacking the literal meanings of words and imposing strong epistemic standards just totally cut across each other. So I think your definition is wrong. That is, I don't think bullshit has much to do with the literal meanings of words, except insofar as occasionally there's some correlation between being not literal and relaxing epistemic standards. But I think you can bullshit and insist on literal meanings of words and be only talking literally. In fact, I think that you can bullshit someone by insisting on the literal meanings of their words, right? When it's like clear from the context that they don't mean it literally and that they're making a good point, but you're pushing on the literal thing to bullshit.

Robin:

I meant that most of our epistemic standards will be applying to the literal meanings of words. That is, we don't typically use epistemic standards with respect to body language or tone of voice.

Agnes:

Oh, not body language, but I think there's just a lot in context that's relevant that's not given by the literal meanings of words. I mean, sorry, maybe I don't know what you mean by literal meanings of words, but much of the meaning of a given utterance comes from understanding its role in a context.

Robin:

We find it hard to have critiques of that. I mean, so most of our epistemic critiques are going to be taking things relatively literally because we just don't really have ways to not do that. That is, you know, if you tell me two probability numbers that, you know, are compliments that don't add up to one, I can critique that if you actually say those things literally. But if you sort of imply them with your tone of voice or something, it's really hard to critique.

Agnes:

Right, so okay, so let's separate two things, maybe that so one of them is. Um, so something like, um, what you explicitly communicate, which is not restricted to the literal meanings of your words. Um, um, because you can explicitly communicate things. Um, no, I, I, I don't think the distinction is like, even that's not going to work. Um, I'm not really sure how we distinguish stuff about tone and body language from. uh what what you say um and i mean and i'm not sure that distinction is relevant to bullshit but i but i i don't i can't at the moment i'm i'm sort of struggling to come up with a clear way to distinguish maybe you're looking for something like the semantics pragmatics distinction No, probably not. Probably not that.

Robin:

I mean, I guess if we take your epistemic standards point, I mean, I think is to say epistemic standards are only practically applicable to certain aspects of communication.

Agnes:

I don't think that's true. I think that when people know each other well, they could say, Wait a minute, you raised your voice at the end of that. Did you mean to be questioning it? And if so, why? That is, I can apply epistemic standards to your raising of your voice.

Robin:

When it's clear, perhaps. But a lot of communication just isn't clear enough to be so precisely agreed on. And that's a feature of a lot of communication.

Agnes:

One thing I can do is ask for more clarity if there isn't more clarity. And that's applying epistemic standards.

Robin:

Right, but I think part of the point is that what happens when people accuse other people of bullshit and use that word is that they typically accuse people of not meeting epistemic standards or perhaps not sort of being consistent in the literal meanings of the words and then we often find it hard to judge those accusations. That is, accusations of bullshit are often rebuffed by defenses that, no, I wasn't bullshitting. And we often, I mean, a key part of the phenomena is it's hard to really lay the accusation clearly because there are many ways in which people can pretend not to be bullshitting, even if they are, or to evade the accusation. So that's part of what I was looking for in the, when is it feasible to actually verify that somebody is or isn't bullshitting?

Agnes:

That seems to me an accidental property. The fact that when somebody is bullshitting, we might find it hard to discern that they're bullshitting shouldn't be part of our definition of bullshitting. It's just something that happens to be true of bullshitting. We first have to agree on a definition, the essential property of something, before we get to the accidental part of it. So let's go back to just the definition part, and then we can talk about applying this standard of definition. So you said, oh, they're accusing them of not meeting epistemic standards. I don't think that's right. You're not being precise enough with my definition. My definition says it's not that they're failing to meet a set of epistemic standards. That's not enough to count as bullshitting. It's that they are engaging in a practice. They're making a bid for lowered epistemic standards and you're rejecting that bid.

Robin:

Someone could just fail to meet epistemic standards of yours and you're right I agree but unjustified in order to accuse them of failing to me right but in order to successfully accuse them of not trying to meet epistemic standards, the straightforward way is to show that some particular thing they say doesn't meet the standards that is, if they consistently met the standards. it will be much harder to show that they weren't even trying to meet the standards. That is typically the way that you, the sign of not trying to meet the standards is that you fail to meet them. So that would be the typical way that you would successfully accuse someone of, you know, you would have to add more to your case, but part of the case for saying they're not even trying to meet standards is they aren't in fact not meeting the standards.

Agnes:

In my experience, the label of bullshit is typically not applied in a way where there is any desire to make the case to the person who is bullshitting that they are actually bullshitting. And it's typically applied in a kind of dismissive way. And people do not tend to offer a lot of proof. And so I don't have the sense that this problem of how to determine whether they're really bullshitting is one that sort of occupies people in a significant way.

Robin:

Well, for example, if we take political conflicts where people are divided up politically, often they want to accuse the other side in their political talk of bullshitting.

Agnes:

Right, but they don't do that by way of seeking the other side's recognition that they really are bullshitting.

Robin:

I agree, but the question is, what evidence would you point to?

Agnes:

Why would you point to any evidence?

Robin:

Because sometimes it's not obviously accepted that people are bullshitting, so they want to.

Agnes:

Fair, fair. So I think that the evidence that people point to is not necessarily that they don't meet epistemic standards. Typically, the evidence that people point to is simply if the statement is false. So if I'm just imagining a tweet about, hey, something Elon said is bullshit, what's then the tweet going to say? It's going to be like, because, and then it's going to cite some fact that is a negation of something that he asserted. So I think even though it's true that what we're accusing someone of in accusing them of bullshitting is making a bid for lowered epistemic standards that we do not want to accept, the proof of it lies just in saying that what they said is false.

Robin:

I think in addition to pointing out something that's false, I think they try to point out that it should have been obvious to them that it's false. That is, it's such an obvious falsehood that they couldn't have been saying that without lowered standards.

Agnes:

Good, good, good, good. I think that's right, right. Because you want to show that, I mean, sorry, I think often, often they're not doing that. Even typically, they're not doing that. Typically, they're just showing that it's false. But there's a background presumption Elon should have known or could have easily found out And then the point is, if we assume that background presumption, then the only reason he would have said something which he could have easily found out was false is that he was making a bid for lower depressive standards.

Robin:

So if we back off and say, why would anybody bother to accuse people of bullshit, et cetera, I think we have to come back to the phenomenon of disagreement. We had a podcast on that long ago. Basically, people should be and are a bit puzzled by the fact of disagreement. And, you know, most obviously the fact of disagreement means they could be wrong but maybe I could be wrong. And so the most reasonable response to generic disagreement would be to doubt your own view as well as doubt them, but we often want to find a way to blame them instead of ourselves and then bullshitting is a explanation for why they might be wrong and why we therefore might not be wrong because we weren't trying to lower our standards. So if we say they were trying to lower their standards, then that's a way we can explain our reasoning as solid and not in need of updating in the face of their disagreement. It's basically a way of explaining disagreement by blaming it on their motives and their careless sloppiness and stupidity. Those are our favorite explanations for disagreement. And so that's why I would say the concept of bullshit is so attractive. If people ever lower their intellectual standards or their epistemic standards, well, that's a great thing to invoke to explain why I'm right and they're wrong.

Agnes:

Right, which is why my definition is so good. But let me take a step back. I think that's right. But I think that it's worth something we should have done is just sort of contrast this definition that I'm offering with the standard definition of bullshit, which is the one that Harry Frankfurt offers in his book on bullshit. And that is a definition that was brought up in the conference. And I'm sort of looking it up to get it exactly, but it's something like speaking.

Robin:

Here's how I summarized it in my talk.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Statements produced and heard with less concern for truth or clarity. Okay. Sounds a lot like less of lower epistemic standards, really. It's not that different. Less concern for truth or clarity is, I mean, the epistemic standards about concern for truth and clarity. So that's what they mean.

Agnes:

Right. So. So, I mean, I think that the one, like my recollection of the way that Frankfurt put it is that it's something like speech that doesn't have any regard for the truth. Your version of what Frankfurt is already an improvement. Because I just don't think that there is any speech that has no regard for the truth. I think even if you're lying to people, you have regard for the truth. You always have regard for the truth when we talk. I'm not even sure. So I think less regard for the truth is better. But I think that you could believe something, and you could believe that it's true, without, say, having much of a justification for it's being true, or an explanation of why it's true, or an ability to rebut counterexamples. But you could still, it's very much a fact of life that people have beliefs.

Robin:

Our epistemic norms are that in that situation, you should be less confident. That is, you should know that you don't have a justification, and therefore, you should know that you don't have a very good basis. And you couldn't reasonably believe very strongly in the situation you just described. So if you do believe strongly in the situation, you have less regard for our epistemic standards, i.e., and also for the truth.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess I think those, I'm not inclined to collapse those two things. Just because I think that, at least for us personally, a person might although they can't respond to counter-arguments. feel just very, very confident in the truth of what they're saying, and they think they do have regard for the truth because they think this thing is true, even though they have no evidence for it. They strongly think it's true, so they care about the truth.

Robin:

I'm happy to accept your definition if we can then use that as a basis to discuss the phenomena instead of discussing definitions, because it seems like the interesting questions are, why does this phenomena exist? Why do people so often use it as an accusation? using it hypocritically as an accusation, that is, are the people accusing other people of bullshit just as guilty of it themselves? Is there a problem with too much bullshit in general, or is it just an opportunistic accusation that's made? These seem to me the more interesting questions about bullshit.

Agnes:

So the reason why I think it's important to establish that it's not just something like speaking without regard for the truth, but it is something like making a bid that isn't getting accepted is that I actually think it helps address your puzzle about disagreement, to think about it my way. That is, your puzzle about disagreement is, that we feel like our disagreements with other people sort of should have implications for what we think, but that they don't have. That is, we're not drawing a set of conclusions from the disagreements. And what calling someone a bullshitter allows you to do is to say they're opting out of the rational discourse game. And so I'm being perfectly justified in, you know, ignoring them. That is, I'm epistemically kosher even though I'm ignoring a rational interlocutor because they're not a rational interlocutor because they've opted out. And they've opted out by asking me to opt in to a lowered epistemic game.

Robin:

So for this to work, it has to be true that people kind of know when they're bullshitting. Because if you didn't know when you were bullshitting, you might in fact also be bullshitting and you wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't be true that you're more likely to be bullshitting than they are. That is, we need some way to be telling that they're bullshitting and I'm not, or some degree of version of that, so that I could be justified. It wouldn't actually matter that I wasn't.

Agnes:

So suppose the point here is only to rule them out as someone with whom I have to engage. If they're bullshitting, I don't have to engage with them. Even if I'm a bullshitter, I still don't have to engage with them. I'm just as bad as they are.

Robin:

So think of it as a continuum of you could be bullshitting more or less, in the same way that you could be drunk more or less, or any other way that you could be less capacitated. So if I disagree with you when you're drunk, I might think I'm justified in holding my opinions and rejecting your disagreement. But if I could be just as likely to be just as drunk as you but not know it, well, now it's less clear I should be rejecting your possibly drunk views against my possibly drunk views.

Agnes:

I guess the way that I was understanding the concept of bullshit is to accuse someone of bullshit is to accuse them of having fallen below the epistemic threshold where you're obligated to take their ideas seriously, which could happen with drunkenness, right? So like someone could be drunk enough that you shouldn't take what they say seriously. We could have such a threshold. I mean, we have such a threshold with driving, right? And the point is, it doesn't matter how drunk you are. If you think that they pass that, if you think they pass that threshold, they're like, they're not someone you should take seriously. You should find someone who isn't drunk and take them seriously. It doesn't matter whether you're drunk or not.

Robin:

The careful analysis of the situations does not reveal a threshold above or below which you should suddenly switch. It's a continuum. They are just less reliable the more drunk they are, the more bullshitting they are. But you're also less reliable in the same way. So it's about the relative incapacitation or capacity in comparison.

Agnes:

Well, it might not be a label. when I apply the labels. So I can describe someone as incapacitated by alcohol. And what I mean is that they are above a certain percentage of blood alcohol level or whatever, where I determined that to be incapacitation, right? And it could, even though there's an underlying continuum, our label doesn't have to respect that continuum. Our label can just pick a cutoff point and say, anyone who's above that point can't drive or can't testify or can't do a bunch of other things. And it could well be that when we say of someone that they're bullshitting, what we're saying is they've asked for epistemic standards to be lowered to a point where whatever they say can be dismissed.

Robin:

But you can't dismiss them just because they pass an arbitrary threshold. That's incoherent. That is, if we're talking about epistemic standards or evidential standards, then, for example, if we're both considering which of us should drive, even if you are below some official standard for being, you know, sober enough to drive, if I'm even lower than that standard, it still might be better to have you drive than me drive. So, and similarly in discussing the actual evidence and relative weight you should put on us depend continuously on these parameters, not, and they don't reflect some arbitrary cutoff.

Agnes:

But it might be that we are, I guess I'm just inclined to think that it is a cutoff point. And the cutoff doesn't have to actually mark some specific same point. So here's a point that Harvey Sachs makes about language, the way language relates to measurement. We have lots of linguistic concepts that we use, that we talk to each other, like old and young. or I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, or smart or whatever, where there's actually quite a bit of content in those words, but people are going to have different cutoff points and we don't try to coordinate. In a group of 80-year-olds, a 60-year-old is young, and everything that goes along with young is going to go along with that person. But if he's around 40-year-olds, he's going to be old. And that's part of how we use language. And so language pulls apart in a certain way from the scientific reality. And with many concepts, what we do is we're like, they're above the threshold. And we don't say what the threshold is, but we say something like, look, they're above what a reasonable person should think the threshold is. They're at the point where we should dismiss them. And the point isn't about taking what they say as being a basis for updating. The point is, do I have to converse with them or communicate with them or be in dialogue with them? And like, should you get into a car with me if I'm incapacitated? Should I drive you? No, that's the question. Not which of the two of us should drive, but should I drive you? No, you should just not get in a car with me. Forget about getting in a car with me because I'm too drunk to drive. You're even drunker, right? You shouldn't drive either. Gotta find somebody else to drive. If anyone's gonna do any driving, it's not gonna be either of us. That would be the idea.

Robin:

It seems to me like you're focused again on defining the word and how people use the word. And I want to talk about the phenomena. So the phenomena is we disagree and we wonder how much to worry about our disagreements. And that phenomena is continuous with the degree of bullshitting or the degree of alcohol. And then the interesting thing to me is how to respond to that phenomena of, many people often changing their epistemic standards and maybe not even be fully aware of how they're lowering their standards. I think quite often we switch, say, in politics or other moral or other personal things, and we don't quite notice that we're changing our standards. And that's a problem.

Agnes:

I would describe the phenomenon differently for you. I think the phenomenon is we don't know who we should talk to. and who we're obligated to listen to. That is, who should we be in conversation with, is the question that we're asking ourselves. About whom are we allowed to say, I'm not going to talk to them. It's not about updating on the basis of what they think, it's about who are we supposed to be in dialogue with. I think we can dismiss people from the dialogue on the basis of incapacitation.

Robin:

a degree of incapacitation. But you think there's a sharp threshold in that degree where you can just dismiss people?

Agnes:

Because I think the question, should I be in dialogue with them, is a yes-no question. It's not a degree question. If you were updating, you could update more or less. You could take this thing, right? But conversation isn't like that.

Robin:

Your prototypical examples of accusing, say, the other political side of bullshit is a continuous case of how much weight to put on their opinion. You're not actually talking to them at all.

Agnes:

I don't think that is what you're saying. That's what I'm saying. I think what you're doing, the conversational move you're making, is dismissing something. You're not saying, put less weight on this. That's not what it is to call it bullshit. To call it bullshit is to say, chuck it in the trash. Don't update on it at all. Treat it as zero information. And I get that from the point of view of a certain rational theory, that's not how people should act, but that is how they act. That's the social space that they're in. And in my view, that's the interesting phenomena, is the space that they're in, not a model that we've come up with that doesn't fit the way people actually think and act.

Robin:

Well, now you need to explain this phenomena of dismissal. You're claiming it doesn't track evidence or informativeness. So what is the basis for dismissal if not evidence or informativeness? You're going to claim bullshit is all about the righteous dismissal of people, which is not directly related to their evidence or informativeness. What is the basis for dismissing people then?

Agnes:

It's that they've made a bid for lowered epistemic standards, and you're rejecting that bid because it's too low.

Robin:

But that bid comes on a continuum. Why have that threshold for when you reject them?

Agnes:

I guess I think that's fair, but we could say, why have the threshold for when we call someone tall? We do call someone who have a certain threshold tall.

Robin:

Calling someone by name is different than dismissing them. Dismissing them is an action. It's not just an arbitrary label.

Agnes:

But we can perform actions on the basis of judgments of someone's being tall I mean, but then you'd have to have a reason for a cut off if you have a cut off and how you treat people as tall. I don't think I think often there's a cut off but we're not able to point to it or specify it very precisely but we can be pretty clear. when it's been passed. So I would find it, I would be hard pressed to tell you when the cutoff is between day and night, but I might be able to say to my kids, look, it's too dark for you to go out. And they're like, well, exactly how dark does it have to be for me to be able to go out? And I might not be able to answer that question, but I'm saying, no, it's it, it's too dark. It's not dark by this much. It's just too dark. You can't go out. That, what I'm saying is the claim that something is bullshit. If you just think intuitively about the character of the claim, the feel, the vibe of calling something bullshit is not,

Robin:

um calling something something to which you give less weight than other things can we get past your definition of the word and talk about the phenomena uh so people you know are trying to you know insult other people and not themselves and people have the difficulty of knowing you know when how much weight to put on other people and what to believe right um The highest level question do we have, is there too much or too little bullshit in the world, would we would we even know that our most accusations of bullshit fair or unfair. These are more actionable questions rather than just what the definition of word is or does it have a threshold.

Agnes:

Definition is pretty important and pretty actionable. That is, I think we're acting on it all the time. And if we wanna understand what we're actually doing, we need a definition. And it also suggests what the issue is at stake. So it suggests that how much bullshit you see is gonna be a function of how cooperative you're feeling with the people around you. Because if it's your friends, right? And your friends are in some sense inviting you to bullshit and you might be happy to like participate. And then in that space, you're not going to call what each of you are doing bullshitting because it's like in the, it's, you're not, you're not going to, you're not going to be volleying any accusations of bullshitting, right? So you're going to see more bullshitting in a world with less trust and less friendship because anything that even could be heard as an invitation to let's bullshit together is going to get rejected.

Robin:

So let's take an example from the conference, say politician speeches often are accused of being a bit bullshitty. And politicians would have the opportunity, as with most news articles, of asserting that they are not bullshitting if they would post bonds payable if somebody were to show them to be false. And news organizations and politicians don't do this, so some take this as an evidence that they are in fact somewhat bullshitting because they don't take up this opportunity, relatively straightforward, of showing that they are trying to meet high evidentiary standards. Okay, so is this correct that politicians are bullshitting? Is it correct that the customers of politicians want them to bullshit? How can we tell where in our lives we want how much bullshit? And some people seem to be thinking that other people are allowing too much bullshit, but what would the standard be for deciding what was too much bullshit for other people to be engaging in?

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess I think that the idea of playing along in a game of bullshitting fits pretty well with the politician case. Because if you look to who is going to permit or give the politicians license to talk without posting the bonds, It's going to be their constituents and the people who agree with them, right? The people who want them to start posting bonds are going to be their opponents. And so if you want to know who is going to accept your bid to speak with lowered epistemic standards, the answer is going to be your friends. Your enemies are not going to accept that bid. Now, the question is, what would a world look like in which we always maxed out our epistemic standards for every communication? I think maybe you've described it in terms of a world where everything you said you had to post a bond. And nobody wants that world and it seems like an incredibly unfriendly world. And so what that reveals is that in any interaction, in any interchange in which people have even the slightest bit of friendliness towards each other, they are in some sense tolerant of a little bit of bullshit. um they're tolerant of a little bit of like we're gonna be we're not gonna be so precise we're not gonna have such high standards right and like i was a bit salty towards you like a little while ways back when you said of my definition um oh you're you're just saying that they're not meeting epistemic standards i'm like no you're not being perfectly precise my actual definition said um that that you're you're just not accepting their bid for lower epistemic So in insisting on that level of precision, one thing, you could say I was being pedantic, or you could say you were bullshitting. We could put it in either of those ways. If you're like, look, that difference doesn't matter that much. And I'm like, no, it does matter. Every difference matters. And so it seems to me that the world of zero bullshitting is just the world where there's not enough trust and love and fellow feeling for us to tolerate any relaxing of any epistemic standard at any time.

Robin:

So I could give some more examples with respect to the question of, do we have too much or too little? So for example, in the law about fraud, we're actually quite strict. So a favorite example is an advertisement in the back of a magazine that says, surefire bug killer. And if you send your money to them, they send you back two blocks of wood. It says, instructions, place bug between blocks, squish. And it is therefore a surefire bug theory that they were successfully sued for fraud, because we've decided that that's bullshit in the context of magazine ads. On the other hand, there was a set of cases where states passed laws to make it illegal to claim that you had military medals when you don't have military medals, and then the Supreme Court struck that down, saying you have a free speech right to lie about military medals. So we actually have quite a complicated variation in these standards. And there's defamation law, which basically acts as if you have been required to post a bond for some sort of claims you make with each other. And defamation law has a lot of variety in when it's strong or weak. So we clearly do vary our standards. for clarity and epistemic standards, but then we often apply high standards to our opponents and rivals. and to businesses and to rich people and to, you know, the foreigners, and we'll apply low standards to our friends and lovers and family and et cetera. And so, you know, do we think that these standards are actually tracking something important in terms of when they're high or low, or are we just opportunistically using them to dump on people we don't like?

Agnes:

Well, sort of more generally, it's not the question of applying which standards where it's the question of who are we willing to relax our standards for. And so my definition predicts that you're going to find more bullshit in a world with more hostility because there's going to be more of a refusal to relax the standards. And then that refusal lends to what the other person saying being called bullshit. Right. So a world in which two worlds where all of the beliefs are equally well evidenced. But in one world, there's more hostility. In that world, there's going to be more bullshit. So bullshit doesn't just track epistemic equality, it tracks- Yes, according to your definition of the word.

Robin:

But if we set aside the word and just ask- But I think it's true.

Agnes:

I think that that picks out a truth about the world. That's why it's useful to get definitions, because I think this was a concept worth defining, and now we learned something. about bullshit. That is, we learn that there's something that looks like an epistemic problem that could be a social problem. So that's like an insight that we get by way of this definition, and only if we actually try to define the word carefully.

Robin:

So you've talked about relaxing standards, but I think there's a sense in which the default standards are already pretty loose, and what we often do is invoke situations where we have unusually strong standards rather than

Agnes:

I agree. And so, so wait, can I add a caveat? So I think there's a problem with my definition, which is that I think sometimes you can bullshit by raising the standards too high. You know, where like, um uh uh like where like somebody makes an objection to what you're saying and they haven't perfectly worded it or something or they you know and you kind of know what they're getting at and you could just respond but instead you're like pedantic about it and i think that being pedantic can be a way of bullshitting it can be a way of in some sense evading a certain set of epistemic standards by insisting on too high a set of epistemic standards that's a It's a complicated case, I'm not sure how to think about it, but I do think actually it is possible to vote by raising the standards.

Robin:

So we could just say people are selective with their standards, they are context-dependent with their standards, and the standards they invoke may not be optimally truth-conducive. So certainly when people talk about, say, academic studies or especially statistical studies, most everybody who knows about statistics and statistical studies knows a number of ways faults you can point to any study. Almost none of them can fail to have some of those faults. And so a common tactic is to find the faults that that study embodies and then dismiss it on the basis of you couldn't trust a study with those faults.

Agnes:

Exactly. And that would be a way of bullshitting by way of high epistemic standards.

Robin:

Because in some sense, reasonable epistemic standards would have you put some weight on these studies, even though they have faults. And so you are, in some sense.

Agnes:

I agree. And so maybe the definition should be modified to something like that. So I still think it's right that bullshitting is people agreeing to relaxed epistemic standards. That is, when people are bullshitting, they're never raising it above a certain point. They're doing the relaxing thing. Is that even true? Is that true? Maybe sometimes actually like intellectuals or academics or something can bullshit by being like hyper precise in a jokey way. Maybe that is a thing. So maybe it's something like wrong epistemic standards. That is ones that we know that are wrong, but we're going to go with it or something. And then when you call someone a bullshitter, you think they're asking you to buy into this wrong epistemic standard and you're refusing to buy in.

Robin:

So I do think often intellectuals or academics will take a sort of natural environment when which people are talking and offering evidence and vibes, and then their consensus or opinion will move but it won't have been justified fully by the literal evidence that was offered. often it will move in part by the vibes they express to each other and just the consensus they perceive and you know the question is an academic might call that bullshit because it's not meeting academic standards of they didn't show sufficient evidence to justify the change in opinion but we might say but in fact people's vibes and their opinions are evidence and this was rational for them to move in this way And I think that's a common conflict academics have when they enter the larger world and people making decisions and drawing conclusions is we often draw, almost all non-academics draw conclusions that do not, you know, on evidence that don't meet academic standards. That is most of the evidence that people use to draw conclusions in the world would just not make the standards of peer review for a paper. You couldn't write a paper without evidence and have it accepted for peer review people and say, no, no, you know, you haven't shown this you haven't done this variation and you haven't precise about this.

Agnes:

And so, so, so, sorry, one thing this is a slight like digression but like your talk at the conference was about how the concept of bullshit. is really a concept that sort of like academics or intellectuals use because for us truth is sacred and so we're offended when someone doesn't care as much about the truth as we do and we call that bullshit. And it occurs to me that one bit of evidence against that analysis of bullshit is that I think academics don't use the word bullshit very much and they don't use it as much as the most routine context in which the word shows up is going to be in politics. It's not going to be by academics. It's going to be by political people towards other political people, people who are not especially academic and don't have especially high academic standards. And so that suggests it's less about seeing the truth as sacred, and it's more about some kind of group schism or something, like as I'm presenting it to be.

Robin:

So as we've discussed before, I've been pursuing this concept of prediction markets for many decades. And there's good arguments that prediction markets do meet high epistemic standards. And there's also a puzzling, to some degree, lack of interest. And so then part of it can be attributed to the fact that it is applying overly strong standards compared to the standards that some communities prefer. And then that makes us pause and wonder, like you could easily understand that maybe high epistemic standards were just a lot of trouble and extra work. And that you might therefore relax them in some context for the purpose of saving that trouble. But this suggests there's more than just that effect going on. There's gonna be often positive reasons why people would like to lower the standards. And then to puzzle what those might be.

Agnes:

Okay, so I just came up with like a really good, my definition, which you hate so much, the fact that I'm producing a definition, but it's giving you a potential explanation for resistance to prediction markets. So first thing to notice is that the explanation that you gave in your talk, which is like intellectuals love the sacred, would predict that intellectuals would love prediction markets and they don't. So that's already a problem. That is intellectuals, if they see truth as sacred, they would be like, this is so great, we're getting more of the truth, but they're not doing that. And then this other part is, like, it looks like we value, we have a positive value on lower specific standards, on being able to lower our standards. And the question is, why would we value that? And my theory gives you an answer, which is that it is a social signal of bonding, right? So it's like, if you and I like each other, then we're gonna let each other bullshit. That's what it means for us, not you and I. You and I are an exception. But people in general, that's what it is to be a friend to someone, is you're not gonna call them on their bullshit all the time. You're gonna, you know, every once in a while you will when it's really gonna help them, but mostly you're gonna let each other bullshit. And if we have prediction markets, you know, we could never be friends.

Robin:

So we could test this against common business applications of prediction markets and their obstacles that we've seen through more, you know, experience there. For example, when projects have deadlines, A prediction market can give a much more reliable, accurate estimate of whether a project will make a deadline, but typically people running projects don't like that. They want to be, what's they say, in control of the narrative. They want to say whether the project's going to make the deadline or not and have people believe that. And they even orchestrate project status meetings where people will repeat the suggestion they give to them about that they're on track to make the deadline. And so this is a concrete example of where people don't want to meet higher standards because they want to be able to control and shape the narrative of that they're going to make the deadline. This isn't just so much about people bonding and liking each other. There seems to be other reasons there.

Agnes:

Because look, if it were just like some one guy wants to control the narrative, All the other guys would be like, no, we don't want you to do that. We want to make money or whatever. But in fact, the reason why the rest of the company or whatever isn't overthrowing that guy who's like, I want to be able to just control all of you and make less money because I want to be in charge, is that there are factions and there are groups and there's a group that supports that guy. And that group wants to be able to be the group that supports that guy. They want to be able to stick together as a group and prediction markets would destroy that. That's the problem. It's not because that one guy wants to control things, it's because the group that that guy's part of wants to stay.

Robin:

Right, but it's not just that that group happens to want to bond together, that is groups often- All groups want to bond together. But they don't just want to bond together, that is a faction in a corporation that is pushing a narrative is doing that in substantial part because they see that narrative as advancing their agendas.

Agnes:

I see that narrative as advancing their identity as a group. I mean, that might be what their agenda is. If we're taking a Durkheim view, going back to the sacred, the groups might be the bottom of the story. That is, the fundamental thing is that we want our group to be in charge so that our group can be the number one group. At least that should be on the table as a possibility, since you were using that framework in your explanation.

Robin:

We read this book together a while back about corporate politics in the 80s. I can't remember what his name was.

Agnes:

We did a podcast on it.

Robin:

Right. Anyway.

Agnes:

Moral mazes?

Robin:

Yes. Moral mazes. I think, but basically that and many other corporate politics stuff I've analyzed over the years definitely gives me the strong impression that it's not just merely that a group wants to bind around some arbitrary shared thing, that they have shared agendas and interests that they pursue via shared narratives that they push. And that's part of, and prediction markers would often interfere with their construction and maintenance of a shared narrative. For example, a shared narrative will have that their project should continue, their people should stay in their positions of power, etc. their designs are good designs, and often rival groups are saying that their project should be ended, their designs are bad, should be replaced, their people should be displaced and replaced, right? And that groups have these conflicts over concrete choices that would advantage some or the other in organizations, and their relaxed epistemic standards often facilitate those narratives and their maintenance.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's gonna be a combination of two things, right? So it's gonna be a combination of the self-interest of the members of the group as they conceive it. So maybe they have peculiar desires for certain end results or just for making money. And then it's gonna be about their, membership in that group and their ability to pursue an agenda by means of a group. That is, you couldn't really pursue almost any agenda without a group. The fact that the prediction market poses a threat to the stability of the group is going to stand in the way of almost anyone trying to ever do anything, given their conception of what it is to do something is to do it with a group.

Robin:

Much of our history is wrapped up in stories of often what we've decided are villainous groups maintaining a narrative that didn't meet epistemic standards and a heroic group that fought for better standards and then better practices. You think of the Salem witch trials or, you know, using hand washing hands for doctors or, you know, also, or thinking that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Right. We often have these stories of conflicting groups with conflicting narratives and then the

Agnes:

a winning group, winning in part by its attention to higher standards, and that we celebrate that, looking at least back in history, making us- If we went to any one of those winning groups, and we examined all of their propositions, we would find many, many flaws, and we'd find many false things that they believed, going back, I'm sure, to Ignaz Semmelweis and hand-washing, right? I'm sure there's a lot of stuff he got wrong about germs, right? you got one important thing right and that's when we remember and that's we sort of just treat that as that's what he thought but maybe we don't want like all of our claims to be examined so carefully because our group coheres on the basis of like a vague unity in a sense that we got something right and a more accurate group conception is not going to be worth bonding

Robin:

But surely as a philosopher, you might be able to comprehend this larger stance by which humanity might say these groups have been pushing their narratives are often hindering humanity's advance and that the raising of epistemic standards tends to be correlated with us all doing better by being able to defy mistaken group consensus.

Agnes:

might be that raising the standards a little bit about one specific thing in one context does help, but it may just be that the ability to lower standards is also a necessary condition and the prediction markets would destroy that. That is, in order for all of humanity's efforts have been basically by way of groups, right? One person doesn't achieve anything. Groups achieve things, and they achieve things because they feel bonded to each other in part, because they feel bonded to each other, because they feel like they can work together. They feel like they can be as one, right? They have a sacred thing that they have in common, and that's dark time. And if I'm right about what bullshit is, and it's somehow just this important thing to feeling yourself as a group that you are bullshitting together, then it may be that we just can't raise them all. We can't raise it all the way up. We can only raise it like a little bit about something some of the time.

Robin:

Can't I read your new book, Open Socrates, which is for sale everywhere. You guys should try it, which we've talked about before. Can't you read that as a call for stronger epistemic standards in certain contexts? Isn't that substantially what it's a call for?

Agnes:

Actually, no, I don't think that's quite what it's a call for. I think what it's a call for is like accepting people's bids. And it's going back a little bit to the thing you said About aren't you drunk to basically the moral of that story is you're also drunk and you're also bullshitting. And so when someone is bullshitting, like, what you have to do is just figure out how you can learn from them. given the imperfect situation you're in, because you're always in an imperfect situation. And this thing that you would really like, which is to have an excuse on the basis of which to dismiss a large portion of the population, ideally all those people who disagree with you, you should just not go looking for that. But that's not the same thing as saying we want to max out all the epistemic standards. I didn't say max out.

Robin:

I said it's a bid for a higher standard. So for example, you're saying you could dismiss them, but don't. That seems to me an epistemic standard. I don't think so, because I think that, like, you're saying find somebody, for example, who doesn't share your load-bearing beliefs in order to challenge yourself. That seems like a standard. You're saying meet that higher standard, and you will do better, you might be tempted not to meet that standard, not to engage with them, not to try to feud with them, not to find such people to talk to.

Agnes:

I don't think that's what I mean by meeting standards. So I'm here. I'm not talking about what standards we have or how high they are. I'm talking about bids. People are making bids, and you have to decide whether or not to accept them. That's what bullshit is about. It's not about how high the standards are. It's about whether you accept the bid or not. And whether you accept the bid or not is not necessarily a function of how high or low your standards are. You might accept it because they're your friend.

Robin:

um okay but again i'm not trying to talk about the word bullshit people like your friend i'm not trying to talk about the word bullshit and its official definition i'm trying to talk about actual behavior i'm saying you are recommending higher epistemic standards in your book that's what i'm saying you are doing not i'm not saying you're referring to the word bullshit in your book i'm trying to not talk about bullshit i'm talking about

Agnes:

I think that's not the most enlightening way of tying my book to the conversation that we've had. The way that I would tie it instead is to say that, like, is to say, actually, maybe your epistemic standards should vary in different conversations. And in fact, there's a point and I talk about this in one of the chapters where Socrates is like, let's lower epistemic standards, that can be fine. but to put the emphasis on, not on the standards, but on the conversational bids, and to say there are bids out there and you should accept them because you're more desperate than you think you are.

Robin:

And I call that a standard. Yes.

Agnes:

You can call it whatever you want, but I can also say that's not a good way to express the point of my book.

Robin:

Basically, there's different behaviors and some of them can be described as better epistemic behaviors and you're recommending the better ones. That's what I would mean by a higher epistemic standard.

Agnes:

My book is trying to tell you that your life should be about the pursuit of knowledge. Yes.

Robin:

And if you do that, instead of the other things you were likely to do, you are behaving in a way that I would say meets a higher epistemic standard because that's more likely to produce insight than the alternative behavior. So you are making a bid for higher standards.

Agnes:

Okay. Maybe that's fair.

Robin:

Well then, you know, you aren't quite so agnostic as you were saying a moment ago about we don't really know anywhere about, you know, whether our standards are too high or too low. Clearly, you're making a big bid of saying in a big way, our standards are way too low.

Agnes:

I think that's right. Maybe a way to put the point of my book is that we can turn this process of making bids for epistemic standards, we can make them really high. And that can still be bonding. We can bond over that. Whereas what prediction markets look like they're doing is just like taking the bonding out of the story. I can put the bonding back in the story and raise the epistemic.

Robin:

I'd say prediction market participants have ways they bond with each other, but they are not quite the same kind you're thinking of.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, the point is, from the point of view of people who are bonding in the normal way, the prediction market looks like a threat. There's always some alternative way you can bond. You're never interested in that when you're bonded already to a certain group of people, because that's what bonds are. You're not willing to give them up for some other bonds, right? Oh, I'll take your family away, but I'll give you a new family. That doesn't work. So your move to introduce prediction markets looks like it threatens the bonds we already have. And what I'm trying to argue with my book is there's a way to raise epistemic standards that strengthen the bonds we already have.

Robin:

Although I might say prediction markets could also strengthen bonds, but that's a claim about the actual effect of the behavior.

Agnes:

I think not the ones we already have, like not the ones in that company that are based on not looking at certain things. They're not going to strengthen those bonds. you might get new bonds and those might be stronger. But again, that's like offering someone a new family. It might be a better family. They might still be like, I'm gonna stick to my old family.

Robin:

Okay, so in summary, we both see a world of varying epistemic standards. And then sometimes people complain about somebody's standards often through the label of bullshit. And then we know that standards vary a lot in by context, but we both have differing ways in which we would like to raise standards. We would like to recommend higher standards in different ways, but not obviously in conflict ways. And we are still struggling to understand how we can explain sort of why the levels of standards are the levels they are and therefore inadequate in the context of trying to help people raise the standards. That is part of the puzzle is why aren't the standards already high if we're trying to recommend raising them.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess, I think that doesn't have much to do with the topic of bullshit. That is, I think that, so that's why, like, I thought we were going to talk about bullshit, and bullshit is about accepting bids for lowered standards, but then there's the question, absolutely, how high they are and how high should they be?

Robin:

That seems to me to be a different- Well, bullshit is also about the phenomena of accusing people of having overly low standards.

Agnes:

Sure, but you could be doing that even if all the standards were really pretty high. And a lot of period bullshit, you're going to be doing that in those circumstances.

Robin:

Right, but it does suggest there's this widespread sympathy for higher standards. That is, if we're willing to accuse people of having standards too low and using it to label bullshit, it does suggest there's a demand of a bit out there for higher standards.

Agnes:

I agree. And I think that when we're bullshitting and we agree implicitly to the lowered standards, it's always only implicitly. We're never going to be explicit about that because it's a little bit shameful to be lowering our standards. And so it'll be like as a joke or an ironic or whatever that we might say that.

Robin:

Right. So I think we're about out of time. So thanks for talking.