21-07-24: On bullshit, again

I wrote 21-03-22: Bullshit but I don't like it now, so here's another version.

But first, an unrelated / semi-related example.

I think it is fun and somehow useful to annotate my actions with fight/flight/freeze/fawn. I am at a party, I feel vaguely uneasy. Do I start doing dishes? — that's "fawn". Do I start reading or studying my phone or something? — that's "flight". Do I just sit and do nothing and watch everybody carefully? — that's "flight".

Similarly, I think it is fun and somehow useful to annotate my words. I don't know what a good set of annotations would be, but some important ones would be "experience", "imagination", "character", "autocomplete".

• EXPERIENCE: I have an example in my mind for whatever I am saying. I might say "revolutions lead to disasters" and imagine the Russian revolution of 1917. I might say "I often lie" and remember a particular lie I told recently.
• IMAGINATION: I imagined "how would the situation develop" and came up with something. An alternative name would be SIMULATION. Example: "I don't like crabs". I actually can't recall when I have last tried a crab — possibly never. But I can imagine how I would feel eating a crab, and I feel "ugh". (Note that when pressed, I might come up with plausible reasons why I wouldn't like crabs. I have tried a bunch of seafood, I almost always hated it, etc. But what actually happened when I was uttering "I don't like crabs" was a simulation.)
• CHARACTER: I am imagining what a certain character would say. This character might not be fictional — it might be a person I am trying to emulate, or it might be a role that I am used to playing. When I am talking to my sister, I feel like I have to play the role of a stereotypical older brother, mixed with [one of my uncles]. The character can be dynamic, it can be an amalgamation of ten different people I've seen in TV shows, etc.
• AUTOCOMPLETE: I am finishing the rest of the sentence based on how it started. "If I was asked at a gunpoint, I would ..." and then I know it has to be a joke so I am autocompleting something that would sound like a joke, without regard for whether it's true or not. This is the closest option to bullshit here.

Those categories can be mixed, sometimes to disastrous effect.

(NB: in the last sentence, after the comma we have [AUTOCOMPLETE]. The effect might not be pleasant but I didn't care at all about whether it's actually disastrous. I just autocompleted the sentence.)

Example of mixing the categories:

When I was a kid, I would have long and heated arguments with my dad. E.g. I would tell him "game developers have physics engines simulating the game universe", and he would say "of course not, it's much easier to just tell the ball 'fall down' than to calculate how it would fall".

• What often happened is that I would IMAGINE how the world actually worked, e.g. I would tell my dad "there are man-years poured into those state-of-the-art engines, and you tell me they don't exist". I imagined the glorious process of physics engine development — yes, in an effort to impress my dad, but I would still imagine it.
• At the same time, a lot of what I was saying was based on AUTOCOMPLETE. "What is a good word? State-of-the-art. Okay, there it goes." Then, since I had said "state-of-the-art" already, I had to back it up with some further imagination — maybe those engines were receiving significant funding from non-game-dev industries. Maybe [something else].

The point of this example is that the categories can drive each other. AUTOCOMPLETE -> IMAGINE -> AUTOCOMPLETE -> IMAGINE.

Okay, that's all for now, I guess.

Or maybe another example.

I finished this post and wanted to say that it was "a nosology of bullshit". This is once again autocomplete driving imagination. Nosology is a fitting word, and then it doesn't matter whether this post is actually a nosology of bullshit (nosology = "classification of diseases"), I will be forced to invent some way for it to be so.

I used to think "nah, literally all people just autogenerate sentences all the time". Now I think that some cooler-headed / rationalist / smth people are actually relying on EXPERIENCE a lot, and the reason I don't use EXPERIENCE much is.. something emotions-related.

Like, maybe I really want to sound cool (because I don't like myself) and that's why I have to use CHARACTER and AUTOCOMPLETE a lot.

It also doesn't help that (I think) what I say usually doesn't matter and doesn't change anything, so there are no consequences for not using EXPERIENCE or not trying to say things that will actually be helpful to others.