On Bullshit

Among contemporary historians, I rate the American historian Stephen Kotkin (Ph.D, UC Berkeley) at the top of a very short list. He focuses on Russian and Soviet politics and history, communism, global history, authoritarianism, and geopolitics. I learned a lot from him on the Stalinist era, and the life of Joseph Stalin. I couldn’t possibly read his biography of Stalin (three volumes, each 1000+ pages) but fortunately his talks and conversations provide what we non-specialists should know.

Another historian I like happens to be a farmer and a scholar: the classicist Victor Davis Hanson. He’s a conversative and comments on contemporary politics. VDH is an expert on military history, ancient warfare, ancient agrarianism, and the classics. VDH divides his time between Stanford University and Fresno, a small town in the Central Valley of California. He works on his family farm which has been with them for six generations.

Both Kotkin and Hanson are senior fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Both frequently appear on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge interviews which are available on the Hoover Institution channel on YouTube.

In 2020, I had the pleasure of briefly meeting VDH at the Mont Pelerin Society conference at the Hoover Institution. I have never met Kotkin. But I feel as if I know the man. I like his accent and his Joe Pesci voice (which even he jokes about.) Anyway, I came across a YouTube video of a Kotkin conversation — How Historians Work: A History Lab Discussion with Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin | Hoover Institution.

At the end of that, Kotkin is asked to list five favorite books. He begins with Alexis de Tocqueville, Nicolo Machiavelli, et al. Then for the fifth he makes a most surprising and — for me — a most delightful choice: Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit.” Listen to the last bit of that conversation.

Here’s what the book is about (written with a little help from my friend an AI):

On Bullshit is a 1986 essay and 2005 book by American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. It defines bullshit as speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. Frankfurt argues that the bullshitter is fundamentally different from the liar; while the liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it, the bullshitter does not care whether what they say is true or false.

This indifference to truth makes bullshit a greater enemy of the truth than lying, as liars at least acknowledge the importance of truth, even if they distort it.

It became a New York Times bestseller and has been praised as a seminal work in public philosophy. Critics have noted its simplicity and narrow focus, arguing it may overlook the audience’s ability to detect bullshit and the dynamic nature of truth. Despite this, the work remains highly influential, with its concepts applied to modern phenomena such as political rhetoric, social media, and large language model outputs, where the uncritical use of generated text is sometimes termed “botshit.”

TIL the word “botshit.”

I come across botshit a lot on X. Though for sure, it is hard to distinguish between botshit and the stuff from the regular retards on X (the only social media platform that I visit.)

What should we listen to? This old tune “Apache”!