So I have been thinking about Matthew Crawford’s assertion that, in the work of a mechanic, the bullshit quotient is low, “unless you’re dealing with Harley owners”. The vehicle either runs or it doesn’t. Similarly a carpenter can appeal to clear and unambiguous criteria. Anyone who questions their work can simply be told, “it’s plumb and it’s level – check it yourself.” For most people who do manual labor, the standards internal to the task are clear – and the evidence is available for anyone to see.
Not so for intellectual endeavors.
And so the phrase “bullshit quotient” has had my attention today. Is it actually possible to calculate a sort of bullshit index?
An obvious stating point is to define bullshit – and this is easy enough to do. Frankfurt’s (1986) is the definition that initiated the literature on the subject. He defined bullshit as an orientation to truth that differs from honesty or lying. We can argue about whether it is possible for a person to ever really know the truth about anything – or whether truth is actually a thing at all. But that is beside the point here. To speak of a person as honest or a liar is to accept that they have something in mind they believe to be true. An honest person, when she genuinely believes a state of affairs to be true, tries to communicate to (or convince) others of that state of affairs – in good faith. A liar, when they genuinely believe a state of affairs to be true, tries to obscure it; to communicate to (or convince) others that something else is the case – in bad faith. What an honest person and a liar share is a regard for truth. Bullshit, in contrast, is disregard for truth. A bullshitter’s goal is to persuade listeners for some other purpose, and he may use true claims or untrue claims to achieve it.
Cohen (2002) argues that, in academia, bullshit manifests as a disregard for meaning – though he suggests much of the bullshit (noun) produced by scholars is not the result of a conscious aim to bullshit (verb). Academics, it seems are simply inclined to believe our own bullshit.
The implication of Frankfurt’s definition is that bullshit is driven by favoring self-interest over moral duty to others (thus, the higher bullshit quotient for groups in which membership is taken as an indicator of social status) – or when a person can easily mislead themselves (as with academics’ inclination to believe our own bullshit). Furthermore, bullshitting is only possible when truth (or evidence of truth) can be hidden or obscured – or when attention can be distracted from it. If one’s work leaves a physical trace in the world, which is publicly available for evaluation, then it is impossible to bullshit about it.
We can conclude then that a propensity toward bullshit must be directly proportional to a person’s sense of self-importance, based on group membership (e.g., Harley owners), as well as their inclination to be mislead into believing their own bullshit. It must be inversely related to the extent to which the outcomes of their work are available for public evaluation.
Thus, the bullshit quotient of a field can be modeled as:
where SI is the perceived status of the field by people within it (i.e., self-importance), OS is the propensity for people in the field to believe their own bullshit (i.e., own shit), and PE is the degree to which evidence of outcomes is available for public evaluation. As Crawford highlights though, there are two components to this availability for public evaluation. The first is the degree to which experts and lay-people can directly experience (i.e., perceive via the senses) their work in the world. A doorway, a counter, a shelf, a building – all of these can be touched, manipulated, and measured by any observer. Concepts cannot. The second is the degree to which the quality standards for their work (i.e., the standards internal to the task) are apparent to all observers. The importance of plumbness and levelness are obvious for constructed objects. When they are absent, doors fall closed and crush fingers in their path, items roll off of counters or shelves, and buildings lean or fall over. The importance of validity, reflexivity, and praxis only become comprehensible with much explanation and gesturing. With this in mind, the public evaluation term can further be decomposed into two components:
where C is the concreteness of outcomes and TS is the degree to which the the standards internal to the task are apparent to observers (i.e., the transparency of standards).
This model in hand, it is now possible to estimate bullshit coefficients for specific fields of human endeavor. For example:
The bullshit quotient is among the lowest for people working in building trades. If a carpenter, electrician, or plumber gets their job wrong enough, the building falls down, starts on fire, or fills with the most unpleasant evidence of human effluvia – so the evidence of doing their job right is there for all to see (or smell). The standards of their tasks are also clear. And all this is as evident to lay people as it is to the professionals themselves, so there simply is no opportunity for these practitioners to begin to believe their own bullshit. The truth is too apparent to be evaded. These are also professions that impose a degree of humility on their practitioners, so self-importance is low – though it is not non-existent. People in these jobs can show some disdain for other professions in which no tangible skill is evident (I don’t mean that to sound judgmental. I am inclined to agree with them on this. But it does introduce a bit of self-importance.) Overall, the bullshit quotient is very low among such fields. It may not be as low as it is among servers, where self-importance is lower. But these professions anchor the low end of the bullshit scale.
The work of mechanics, machinists, and welders shares most of the characteristics of builders. However, quality criteria may be less visible to non-specialists in these fields. When something is obviously wrong (e.g., the car doesn’t start) it is typically apparent to any observer. But expert welders can judge the strength of a weld from its appearance – penetration, consistency, porosity, etc. Expert machinists can see quality and precision in surface finish – and can judge differences on the order of .001” by touch. Mechanics can hear subtle evidence of wear while an engine is running and see it in patterns made by dirt sticking to the frame. These are among numerous forms of tacit knowledge that make these professionals perceptive of nuances that are unfathomable to non-specialists. Thus, the standards of the task are somewhat more opaque to people without expertise.
On the other end of the spectrum, the sense of self-importance of billionaire business moguls and politicians tends to be off the charts – as does their capacity for becoming certain of their own bullshit. Very little of what they do is concrete and much of their energy goes to intentionally manipulating or obfuscating the criteria (i.e., “spinning”) by which their work is evaluated. The bullshit quotient is high with these groups. They surely anchor the top end of the scale.
I would argue that philosophers share the location at the top end of the scale. While I am less inclined to ascribe the nefarious intentionality I see in billionaires and politicians, there is a long history, in Western thought, of philosophers thinking themselves into intractable quandaries – protected with impenetrable linguistic fortifications (which serve to keep the philosophers in and everyone else out). Few fields are as abstract as philosophy – and even fewer boast such inaccessible quality criteria. It also takes a healthy does of self-importance to persist in colonizing thought patterns for 2500 years. This too is exemplary bullshit.
Surely the middle range of the scale must contain some interesting examples.
I think it has to be acknowledged that teachers score moderately on all 4 variables in the model. Teaching is a moral endeavor and many teachers see our work as noble. We see ourselves as busy making a difference in the world (or for particular learners). For some, this sense is justified. For others it is vacuous. But it is a common source of moderate self-importance. It is also easy for teachers in the U.S. to begin to believe their own bullshit. Teachers in the U.S. are typically relegated to their own classrooms and rarely get to see peers in action. We hear ourselves repeatedly, which makes it easy for us to start believing ourselves. In addition, we are also routinely told how bad the education system is in our country – but the evidence we have about our own students suggests they, at least, are learning. This creates a tendency to slip into the belief that we know what we are doing and all those other bad teachers are the reason the system is in such bad shape. At the same time, the most important fruits of our labors usually do not show up for years after students have left our classroom. We can gather some assessment data to determine how effective we have been while students are still with us, but only some data. It is also not clear what criteria should be used to judge the efficacy of a teacher. The ‘no child left untested’ era promoted the misperception that it is easy to judge a teacher by their students’ test scores. But it is not true. We do not all agree on the relevant criteria – even among ourselves. If the whole context of the job is considered realistically, teaching probably belongs around the mid-point of the bullshit quotient scale.
Law may be one of the most interesting professions to fit to this scale. Its social status lends a high degree of self-importance to lawyers. However, a good lawyer must know the weaknesses of their own positions. Lawyers simply cannot be successful if they begin to believe their own bullshit. Legal codes, precedents, procedural details and other aspects of the work of lawyers is necessarily concrete and available for anyone to see. However, the work of advocating a position, or for a particular client, is all about intentionally manipulating the criteria for interpreting/applying that public information. High self importance and concreteness, along with low propensity to believe their own bullshit and transparency of quality standards puts lawyers in the middle of the scale as well.
So far, I have only explored the ramifications of my BQ equation qualitatively for a handful of fields. However, it would be a simple matter to engage a diverse group of experts in a ranking or scoring a range of fields along each of the variables/dimensions of the model. In this way, the actual bullshit coefficient for each field could be calculated and tabulated precisely. In fact, if each variable/dimension were scored on a scale of 1-10, then the the model could be slightly modified to bring the bullshit coefficient into a range of 0-1:
Even among the small sampling I have considered so far, a pattern is emerging: The bullshit quotient is low among professionals whose work is produced by their hands, moderate among those whose work is done primarily in their heads, and high among those who mainly work their mouths.
To be clear, the BQ model only indexes tendencies among groups. Our judgments of individual practitioners are influenced by the field in which they work, but the trustworthiness of any individual member of a professional field is not fully determined by its bullshit quotient (though some fields may create a ceiling effect for their members). We revere politicians that we consider trustworthy because, with a bullshit quotient that high, extraordinary integrity is needed to remain a person who can be trusted. We revile builders who are not trustworthy, because with such a low BQ, a carpenter, electrician, or plumber must be deplorably dishonest in order for their work not to be trusted. Those in the middle – teachers, lawyers, and others whose work is primarily in their heads – are likely to be most variable in terms of trustworthiness. In short, integrity must increase in proportion to BQ in order to maintain trustworthiness:
Or maybe this whole exercise was bullshit. I mean… I am a doctor of the philosophy of education.