I was once asked during an intervierw what would be my top three "professional" values. My answer was unexpected in fact I rushed to qualify it a bit.
I said "I find hard to deal with bullshits and bullshitters".
Philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt's famous book came to rescue me. Frankfurt's thesis is serious and important. Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is not the same as lying.
The liar, like the truth-teller, cares about what is true. The difference is that the truth-teller conveys it while the liar wants to cover it up. The bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t really care one way or the other about the truth.
To quote him:
The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter.
My experience has taught me that the surest cure for bullshit is exposing it to the scrutiny of people who truly, deeply understand a problem through years of lived experience.
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