"Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candour and patience, to study both sides of the question...."~ George Horne, from his 1786 Letters on Infidelity
Hat tip Derek Lowe at Science-Org, who observes: "Those last-mentioned qualities are rather thinly scattered these days."
RELATED: Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
1 comment:
That's very true. It's something I'm prone to forgetting, and I end up spending too much time refuting bullshit at the expense of committing my time to something more valuable. Sometimes the best policy is just to ignore the bullshit. Engaging with it can have effect of giving the bullshit more importance than it deserves in your life.
On the other hand, it's unwise to lock yourself in an echo chamber where you only hear from those who already agree with you. As Jordan Peterson points out, you're most likely to learn something new from someone you don't agree with. It's about balance.
The good news is that there is one ultimate refutation to bullshit - reality, once the consequences of the bullshit become clear. A refutation and a clear explanation of your alternative will always carry more weight by that time, because people are more open to alternatives.
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