Fact checking is a worse-than-useless approach to counter programming bullshit. Brandolini bullshit assymmetry principle —“It takes 10x more effort to refute bullshit than to produce it” — applies doubly to fact-checking, so like 100x. You need better refutation models.

The ingredients of a good bullshit pie. The biggest slice is giving yourself all the benefit of doubt. The second biggest slice is the missing slice of topics avoided/evaded. Fact checking doesn’t work because it on,y applies to the smallest slice.

Both Goebbels and Frankfurt are wrong about the nature of modern social media bullshit

Goebbels: the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell (he attributed this to the British). No longer true. You want a bullshit palace based primarily on aggressively claiming benefit of doubt

Frankfurt: bullshit is indifference to truth/falsity. True only of casual confabulation, not politically motivated bullshitting. It’s still not scripted but the learned improvisational style of someone like Trump is far from indifferent. He is careful not to push clear big lies.

The primary mode of modern political bullshit is neither Big Lie based, nor pure indifference-confabulation. It is “colored noise.”

The 2 biggest things to counterprogram are

a) allocation of benefit of doubt

b) things being actively hidden or evaded/avoided (eg trump taxes)

You counter a) not with “fact checking” since the facts are not dispositive, but by balling out a *pattern* of self-serving benefit of doubt allocation. The easiest way to do that is to mock the person’s stereotypical rhetorical moves rather than examine each case.

This is why the Alec Baldwin impersonations gotunder Trump’s skin. His moves were made legible through exaggerated imitation.

For example, Trump’s been repeating “cupboards were bare”. He goes figurative when numbers tell a complicated wonky story that don’t obviously help him.

It’s a figure of speech so it’s not a lie. There’s no point arguing how many ventilators and masks in the stockpile cross the “bare cupboard” figurative threshold. Playing that game is guaranteed to bore peop,e so he wins by default. So what do you do? You mock the *pattern*

How would you script an Alec Baldwin SNL sketch for this?

Like this perhaps: “the cupboard was bare, the shelves were empty, even the desk drawers in the Oval Office desk were empty. Obama used up the pencils. I had to buy my own pencils. Took me 3 years to do that.”

It’s not the best joke, which is why I’m not an SNL writer, but you get the idea. You can’t fact-check a slippery mix of facts, figures, and figures of speech.

For b, there’s no substitute for investigative digging, whistleblowing, etc. Every big thing he stonewalls on, he also runs a project of interference, obstruction, intimidation, etc. So far he’s won by the “absence of evidence” logic (absence he’s engineered). He’s blameless.

Trump by himself is unimportant now. He’s done his damage for his handler Mitch, and is already in the trash can of history. But he’s installed a culture of bullshitting that so far has no cure or vaccine 4 years in. Time to build a refutation playbook that actually works.

And yes, this thread is bullshit too. Takes some bullshit to fight bullshit. White-hat bullshit like Alec Baldwin’s impressions. https://twitter.com/karlmaeser/status/1252390816795918336?s=21 https://twitter.com/karlmaeser/status/1252390816795918336