Of bullshit and anastomosis
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
The detection of bullshit is a crucial feature of our lives: we are, after all, drowning in it. If you think anastomosis probably IS bullshit, go to the bottom of the class. Anastomosis seems to be little known about but is a crucial structure for bullshit filtering. Nassim Taleb, in his latest popular book, Skin in the Game, says his whole series of books including the Black Swan and Antifragile amount to a life project of bullshit detection. Spoiler alert: he finds no shortage of BS, especially in government functions.
Anastomosis? I have three pillars. Stafford Beer, whose Viable Systems Model I have used extensively, describes the cybernetic function of our brains as an anastomotic reticulum. Alan Rayner, in The Origin of Life Patterns, has anastomotic flow forms as how reality happens. And in a recent article which we will explore a little, Wired into Pain, Tom Jesson explains how our nervous system uses anastomotic patterns to separate the pain we need to pay attention to from all the other signals that are not as significant in preserving our life. Yes, our pain has bullshit filtering built in.
In James Scott’s wonderful new book Against the Grain, it seems that the cradle of civilisation itself was the system of marshes and braided distributory channels in lower Mesopotamia (Greek — between the rivers). Our very being is anastomotic whether we know it or not. The complex ecologies that surged back and forth, our ability to partake of multiple food webs, the social structures that were played with and developed. How far we have fallen.
Rather than an arid zone between two rivers, as it largely is today, the southern alluvium was an intricate deltaic wetland crisscrossed by hundreds of distributaries, now merging, now diverging, with each season of flooding. James Scott
And of course, I am a geologist so I know about the braided river patterns that form the underlying metaphoric image for anastomosis. The thought of a vast expanse of sandy braided channels brings me tranquillity: it is a thought of the vast power of a mighty river, the utter transience of the wonderful patterns. And even braiding, of a young woman’s plaits of course, but I highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. I went straight out and bought some sweetgrass seeds and they are germinating in the greenhouse. The notion of braiding aromatic grass stems as a classic native American gift I found irresistible. We’d better mention The Eternal Golden Braid of Douglas Hofstadter while we are here.
We had better sketch what bullshit is.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” — Harry Frankfurt
Pennycook et al’s paper, On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, says bullshit is designed to impress, but is spoken without any concern for the truth. Lying is more directly manipulative. Truly we are in an era when many things are spoken without concern for the truth, by all sort of people in all sorts of circumstances. There are whole industries where you only get on by bullshitting confidently.
Here is the challenge we are setting ourselves in this blog. Taleb thinks that an individual, properly grounded, can, in the end, detect bullshit and reject it. The recipe is skin in the game and soul in the game and some of Taleb’s sophisticated insights and heuristics. We think that there is an entire economy of bullshit whose most obvious expressions are in social media, and that the detection and rejection of bullshit must be a network or ecosystemic solution. You might like to compare You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? by Danah Boyd.
Let’s focus this as best we can. We are swimming or drowning in bullshit. The food we are sold (actively marketed and sold) is killing us. The economics we are sold by the government is literally killing us. What we are sold as education is destroying our ability to detect bullshit. What we are prescribed by medics to deal with the things that are killing us is backed by bullshit science. So “how can we detect bullshit?” is a hugely important question, swiftly followed by “how can we navigate a world where everyone has been comprehensively bullshitted?”. Nassim Taleb doesn’t say it like that but he was a trader and still has a sense of playing by the rules of the game, so that his bullshit detection can give him a covert advantage. We are talking, rather, about sheer survival.
Anastomosis is after all structural. Taleb rests his arguments on mathematics, which frees him from obsessing over the content. Taleb shows how the numerical strength of religions rests on their rules about marriage, not on the sales pitch for (or truthiness of) the religion. Also, how stubborn minorities prevail, irrespective of what they are stubborn about, provided that they are also well-distributed. This switch from why we think a piece of bullshit is bullshit in terms of its content, to structural or even anastomotic ways of paying attention where we need to, despite the prevalence of misleading bullshit, that is our subject.
Filters
Here are Philip’s filters for the “news”, that he uses to limit the degree to which bullshit agendas impinge on him. In terms of reading journalistic output, a weekly magazine such as the Economist has already let many storms in teacups pass it by. He relies on friends and colleagues to tell him when something important is happening. Of course, this happens more readily if people know he is not consuming news daily (or hourly or by the minute!). A related filter he calls opting out, mostly, just not engaging with the things people with agendas think we should be engaged with. He knows that this makes him both less informed and less misinformed. He absorbs UK news primarily from French sources. (Another colleague uses a Hong Kong channel for this, others use Russia Today.) This always gives a contrasting perspective. Finally, Philip talks about slow gossip, Taleb’s grandmother network, of people who only share stories after they have digested them and think they are worth sharing.
The question of bullshit filtering can be framed as one of trust — who do you trust to have insight behind the bullshit? I have a book, Trust and Mistrust, written with John Smith (incredibly already fifteen years old). It has a model, not surprisingly, of the different sorts of trust, how they interrelate, and what the dynamics of this “trust space” are. It works, it hasn’t dated. The four dimensions of trust are:
· Authority trust, where in the end you trust the Catholic Church or you don’t
· Commodity trust, where in the end you trust Tesco’s systems not to give you food poisoning
· Network trust, where you reference other people and what they choose to trust
· Authentic trust, where you choose a deliberate act of trusting rather than look for trustworthiness
Even from this sketch you can see that most approaches to trust are passive: even due diligence is passive in relationship terms. The active choice is to decide to trust and then work on how not to be let down. Bullshitting is both a cause and a result of low trust: it is just saying what the other person wants to hear, and that is why it is so destructive. A relationship in which real and difficult information can be shared is, I suspect, the only defence against the tide of attention seeking non-communication. We have written elsewhere in this blog about real work: here is real communication and clearly they are very closely linked.
John Smith’s life-guiding principle is to make sure he always has enough degrees of freedom to make meaningful choices. One of the features of most approaches to trust is that you end up having to trust more. For instance, every time there is a food scandal, Tesco have to show how their systems will protect their customers in the future: there is never a move to systems where there is less need for assurance. So, trust tends over time to limit degrees of freedom: only authentic trust, the active choosing of trust, opens up new choices, increases the degrees of freedom available.
Bullshit erodes choice because it obscures which choices can be made meaningfully. If people just tell you what you want to hear then you don’t know where the significant risks and the significant actions are. Ergo you can’t choose them.
The world is still not flat
If you could systematically and accurately filter out bullshit, you would still not have solved the problem. Some BS is more prevalent, more destructive, more misleading, more authoritative, more important epistemologically. Like a denial of service attack you can be flooded with bullshit (arguably we already are) so that you never get to understand which the key elements of the bullshit are: what is it you really need to understand? Why is someone bullshitting you in the first place?
The big thing we can learn from the metaphor of pain is about structure and priority. Apparently if you classify battlefield major injury and trauma, many severely injured combatants do not feel pain from their wounds. (Sorry about this.) The pain system is not about the past, it is about the future. The future on a battlefield is about continuing to stay alive, not focussing on existing injuries. The plethora of very real nerve signals coming from many parts of the body have to be ruthlessly prioritised, partly against models of what it all means. The anastomosis is the mingling of many, many channels of information both from nerves carrying signals, from the skin for instance, and nerves carrying expectations from some sort of mental model.
We have written before about warm data labs, as practised by Nora Bateson. Think of the structure of the lab: there are clustered discussions between the participants, with each cluster have a different central theme. And participants flow between clusters as they see fit, taking the sense of a conversation they have just had into the sense of the next conversation. Notice there is no content-oriented structuring of the mechanism: the structure is essentially the same for any lab and is anastomotic in its operation. The lab does in practice enhance everyone’s sense of both the connectedness of the overall problem and of the necessary prioritisation of action.
Our bullshit filters must have these features. If we take a move out of the Trumpian playbook: say something outrageous (again). The statement is almost certainly bullshit, say Canada’s trade surplus with the US. And everyone knows it is bullshit, but most peoples’ thinking is derailed while they establish that the purported facts are wrong and this allows something else to happen in the interim. The more outrageous the statement, the better the play works. Our bullshit filter, like the combatant on the battlefield, has to ignore the fireworks and sharpen its attention on what else is happening that might be the real reason for the statement. We have to have a model of what might be happening that Trump might need to distract people from in order to temporarily suppress our outrage while we deal with what really matters.
To take this one step further. If, as in Taleb, a trader is getting his trades right the great majority of the time, if that a safe situation or a risky one? Well, it’s very risky because the underlying risk is not showing itself. The rule when you are playing poker is that if you don’t know who the patsy is, it must be you. So, if we are paying attention to our bullshit filter and it seems to be working all the time, that is we are not being surprised, then probably we are being royally shafted.
Of nets, networks and seas of BS
Taleb thinks he can detect BS and of course is very entertaining in pointing things out. I get the impression that what he is describing is a world of competitive experts. He rightly hates the authoritative holding forth on what other people should do produced by people who have nothing to lose themselves if they are wrong. The cardinal sin is to dump your risk on someone else and, since we are on the cusp of the next crash, that happens by the shedload, and he is right to be caustic.
We are looking at a slightly different problem, the one where public life has descended into a situation where none of the obvious sources of information or direction can be relied upon even for a moment. Truly a sea, an ocean of BS. I think we have to take it that truths we would like to discern in this unhelpful environment, the facts we would like to glimpse while everything conspires to distract us, are social things. They mostly need to be understood in an intersubjective way. I don’t care whether Canada is running a surplus with the US at the level of how international accounting is done, but I have to care if secret trade deals are being cooked behind the façade of misinformation. The people who do that sort of scheming never have my interests covered: there are no circumstances in which they could be trusted by me.
Our bullshit filter has to have social network dimensions to it. I need to understand something together with you. Not only do I need your contribution to filtering and triangulating an even being part of an anastomotic pattern, I need to understand your conclusions and you need to understand mine. If you are following me in this argument, that is what we are doing now. The social network is the grounding of the reality that is emphatically not what we are being sold.
Signals and noise
We are saying that bullshit is noise. We are saying we can’t detect the signal we need to hear because of all the bullshit. We are saying that this noise is not lies and deliberate misinformation, it is just stuff spoken into the expectation of what people want to hear or indeed what they expect but don’t want to hear. But the mother of all questions is whether in all this there is signal. Not in what is said but in the nature of what is said, how it is said, when it is said and its context.
By way of comparison think of mobile telephone metadata. Government spies say that they need to access the metadata and so long as they don’t listen in to people’s conversations, that is alright. Clearly it is not alright, and the pattern of people’s mobile phone traffic is highly significant. By the way, yours truly can’t learn anything from the lack of pattern of his own metadata or lack of it! Note that one tenet of encryption experts is that anyone can design a system/algorithm that they themselves can’t break — but which might be trivial for others to crack…
We do of course adapt to the patterns of communication including bullshit. I put a call blocker on the house phone. I rarely answer calls especially if I don’t know the number. I rarely open letters I am not expecting. We don’t have a telly and I use a VPN and adblocker on this laptop. But I suspect the pros at this game are much more discerning than I. Being a pro is insufficient, as that top US General found out when trying to conceal an extra-marital affair. The sophisticated bullshitters are also noticing who pays attention to their nonsense and who doesn’t, and that is a signal.
If we were less literal and plonky, we would not say “Is that true?” we would ask ourselves what pattern of metacommunication we are seeing, or not seeing yet. We would subtly prod the system to get more information about what its undeclared purposes might be. Because the one thing we can absolutely take for granted is that anything we are presented with is not what it purports to be.
If we paid attention to our own bullshit filters and to whether we have understood the biomimicry of the pain model, then we could relax about all the things that people are trying to do to us and just enjoy the fireworks.
If you take nothing else from this blog, take that if you’re not being surprised, you’re being bullshitted.
