We live in an era of and no one knows what to do with it

Columnist and Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs Nathan J. Robinson wrote full of pain Material About seemingly obvious things – the most famous and successful people are constantly talking bullshit and everyone believes them because they are famous and successful.

• Elon Musk is constantly inventing features of Tesla cars that do not exist, and his Boring Company has not fulfilled even a tenth of its promises — the same Hyperloop trains are not on the horizon;
• The founder of the FTX crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, defrauded millions, pretending to be almost a saint;
• Popular American politician George Santos invented that he was half Jewish, half black, that his mother was killed during the September 11 attacks, that he had a brain tumor (all lies) and was elected to the US House of Representatives;
• Joe Rogan advised ineffective cures for COVID-19 and claimed that Atlantis was real;
• Obama's insurance program is bullshit;
• Donald Trump was simply Donald Trump (and continues to be popular);

There are no answers as to what to do about it. Robinson proposes to fund the popularizers of rational thinking and gradually create a "culture of thoughtfulness" – but it seems to be the same bullshit.

The clearest philosophical exposition of the theory of was put forward by Harry Frankfurt in his short book "." Frankfurt argued that nonsense is different from lies, and in some respects even worse. A liar knows that what they say is false. Chatterboxes are not Worries, whether it is true or false. Liars have not given up all understanding of the truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking differently than they really are, while chatterboxes have simply stopped checking if the claims they make have any resemblance to reality:

"When an honest man speaks, he says only what he thinks to be true; and for a liar, accordingly, it is necessary that he considers his statements to be false. However, for the talkers, all these bets are canceled: he is not on the side of truth and not on the side of lies. He does not pay attention to facts at all, as an honest man and a liar, except that they may have to do with his interest in getting away with what he says. He doesn't care if what he says describes reality correctly. He just chooses them or invents them according to his goals."

According to Frankfurt, one of the reasons we have so much shit is because in public life, people find themselves in circumstances where they are called upon to express opinions on topics they don't understand and feel the need to get confused by just making up some nonsense:

"is inevitable when circumstances require someone to speak without knowing what they are talking about. In this way, the production of is stimulated whenever a person's commitment or ability to talk about a topic exceeds his knowledge of the facts relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is often found in public life, where people are often induced—whether by their own inclinations or the demands of others—to talk a lot about issues of which they are somewhat unaware. Closely related cases arise from the widespread belief that a citizen in a democracy is obliged to have an opinion about everything, or at least about everything, that concerns the conduct of affairs in his country."

Frankfurt's work is fun and rewarding. I've come to the conclusion that, in general, people really believe in their own nonsense. That is, they Really care about "reality"; They just think that their personal beliefs are an accurate description of it. Professing to be reasonable and actually being reasonable are two very different things, but many people whom I would classify as "talkers" are convinced that every word they say is God's truth.

We just don't have enough public shit catchers. Twitter, a colossal pit of shit, is now run by the chatterbox king himself. (Вскоре после приобретения Twitter Маск продвигал безумную теорию заговора о том, что на мужа Нэнси Пелоси напал любовник-гей.) We need more people who help others see through confident incorrect statements, noisy and successful.

is often dangerous – over the course of the pandemic, many people listened to the terrible medical advice of people who didn't know what they were talking about, and those who avoided vaccinations or thought garlic was better than a mask eventually died.

The amount of "fake news" on social media is endlessly commented on. But the problem goes much deeper than the algorithms of Twitter and Facebook feeds. We also have a culture where arrogance is rewarded rather than restrained, and people can see that with enough shameless bragging, you can become the richest man in the world or the president of the United States. There is no quick fix, but we at least need to understand what we are trying to change...