Bullshit Free – The BS Prize

(Cut the Bullshit) is Total Bullshit (5-Stars)

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(Cut the Bullshit) Len Bakerloo Speaks Truth to Power is playing in:

New York: 59E59 Theater on July 12 & 19 at 6:30 PM and July 12, 2016 at 8:30 (Tickets are $15 here.)

Edinburgh: Moriarty’s on August 5-15, 18-28, 2016 at 11:15 AM each day. Admission is free and non-ticketed. More info here.

In this show, Len Bakerloo (not his or her real name) talks about his (or her) 30 years on Wall Street as a programmer, analyst, and hedge fund manager where he (or she) made his (or her) money by keeping cool, acting rationally, and not believing the bullshit that passes for insight (but is really marketing crap).

Len teaches that the most dangerous bullshit is the bullshit you believe and to help you get better at identifying bullshit he (or she) had created the Cut the Bullshit Game. Len says, “This game is as much fun for the bulshittee as the bullshitter.”

(Cut the Bullshit) Len Bakerloo Speaks Truth to Power earns 5 red stars for being ‘Total Bullshit’ and also 5 yellow stars for having ‘Bullshit Free’ because Len calls out his own bullshit, which doesn’t make it bullshit at all but instead more like honest disclosure.

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Harry Frankfurt and his essay On Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt is a Princeton University philosophy professor who published an essay, On Bullshit, that eventually became a best selling book.

The essay begins:

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.”

Then, Harry makes his contribution.

It was a hard slog and a few pages in I skipped to the final paragraph:

“But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”

People say he makes good points. I wish I could figure out what they are.

If you have a Ph. D. in Philosophy, then this earns a Bullshit Free rating:

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For the rest of us it gets a Some Bullshit rating because you cannot help getting the feeling that the author is just showing off and could have made most of his points with fewer shorter words. Review2