About Bullshit
By Zhenya Kuryshev, Evgeniya Volyanskaya, Sergey Safonov, Dmitry Kalichkin
The Nature of Bullshit
Recently, we pondered an interesting paradox: we live in an age of unprecedented access to information and, at the same time, in an age of total bullshit. What’s most interesting is that bullshit is not simply lies or deceit. It’s something much deeper and more fundamental, embedded in the very nature of human society.
The world is mired in bullshit, and on one hand, it seems like there’s nothing special about it. Well, it’s just how things are; everyone is used to the idea of “fake it till you make it.” This gradual acclimatization to bullshit is especially dangerous—like crabs in boiling water, we are being slowly “cooked,” with the temperature of acceptable falsehood in society increasing bit by bit.
It seems to be related to the fact that we live in an increasingly complex world, and to reduce information anxiety, we look for ways to simplify complex narratives without regard for the truth. Perhaps bullshit is a sort of defense mechanism that kicks in during the struggle for attention in our complex information environment.
Imagine an Instagram influencer who talks about the “secrets of success.” They might not necessarily be lying—some of their tips might actually work. But they don’t care about the truth of these tips. They only care about how many likes and followers they’ll get.
In his book On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt provides a precise definition of this phenomenon: “A bullshitter is a person who does not care about the truth.” This is the key difference between bullshit and a simple lie. A liar knows the truth and deliberately distorts it. A bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth at all—they simply say whatever they find advantageous at the moment.
This definition seems simple, but it exposes the deeper essence of the problem. When someone lies, they at least acknowledge the existence of truth; they just choose to hide it. A bullshitter exists in a parallel reality where the very concept of truth is blurred and unimportant.
Bullshit in Myths and Systems
Paradoxically, humanity in many ways owes its existence to the ability to create and spread bullshit. Our ancestors didn’t just pass along information about where to find food or how to avoid predators. They created myths, gossiped, and invented stories. This allowed us to form large social groups and cooperate on a scale unattainable by other species. As Ken Wilber notes, “There’s no person in the world who could be 100 percent wrong.” Even the most fantastical myths contain a grain of truth that helped our ancestors survive and develop.
So, bullshit is not just an individual problem—it’s part of a system. It’s embedded in the very structure of our society, economy, and technology. We have created systems that reward bullshit, and now they are working against us. This is especially evident in the entrepreneurial environment. As one discussion participant observes: “As an entrepreneur, I understand that bullshit makes me do one thing even though I’d rather do something else.” This creates a vicious cycle: startups exaggerate their metrics to impress investors, investors are forced to pretend they believe these metrics, and teams burn out trying to achieve unrealistic goals.
The problem is exacerbated by our gradual loss of connection with reality. In a world where everyone is optimizing their metrics and KPIs, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish real achievements from a polished “package.” Even honest entrepreneurs and investors are forced to play by the rules of a system based on bullshit, or else they’ll lose to those who bullshit more. It’s hard not to recall Moloch here—the demon of unhealthy competition—who seems to make us act against our long-term interests just so we can remain in the game.
Science as the New Religion
Today, we see an interesting phenomenon: science has become a new religion. A telling example is the recent debate between Paul Graham and Nassim Taleb. Graham argued, “Let’s all get vaccinated because we must trust science. If you don’t trust science, you’re just blind, since the whole world works thanks to science.” To which Taleb replied, “The world works thanks to engineers and left-handed craftsmen, and that’s not science at all. The world runs more on risk management than on scientific insights. Scientists still barely understand why airplanes fly, yet they have been transporting people for 100 years.”
Once upon a time, social networks fueled an explosion of bullshit by polarizing society and causing disillusionment in the possibility of knowing the truth. And today, the emergence of large language models like GPT has opened a new chapter in the history of bullshit. These systems are trained on massive data sets, but—and this is the key point—their goal is not to tell the truth; it’s to generate plausible answers that people will like. In their current form, AI systems are unlikely to help in the fight against bullshit, since large language models are literally bullshitters by Harry Frankfurt’s definition.
According to some estimates, by 2030, 65% of all information on the internet will be created by artificial intelligence. And that information will be optimized not for truth, but for what people like. This becomes a closed loop: AI learns from human bullshit, generates its own bullshit, and new AIs then learn from that.
Where Does Bullshit Retreat?
Interestingly enough, we have also found multiple examples where bullshit seems to be receding. For instance, the peak of “influencers” appears to be shifting toward more authentic content, fewer fakes, and less nonsense. It also seems that the peak of cancel culture and wokeness may pass, with culture becoming less radicalized and more moderate.
From a business perspective, it seems we’re seeing more examples of investments going into longer-term projects and less chasing of short-lived trends—though one could argue otherwise. Even the example of Elon Musk calling all his ventures philanthropic creates a role model less reliant on short-term bullshit and more on long-term impact.
Searching for a Solution: “The Kissinger Moment”
Is it possible to find a way out of this situation? One approach might be called the “Kissinger moment”—by analogy with how the legendary diplomat found solutions in seemingly hopeless situations. The essence is to create a system configuration in which every participant gains something of value for themselves while moving toward the common goal of reducing bullshit. But this will only work if everyone agrees to make this move simultaneously.
If every side just tries to take only what it wants, it’s impossible. We need to find a configuration of the system where there’s a bit less bullshit and a bit more truth.
This can manifest in various spheres:
Business: Creating products and services based on real value rather than marketing exaggeration
Investment: Focusing on long-term sustainable growth instead of short-term metrics
Education: Teaching critical thinking and the ability to distinguish truth from bullshit
Technology: Developing systems that encourage cooperation and transparency
Of course, current monetary policies and the modernist idea of infinite growth require their own challenge. And indeed, we see major players, like Elon Musk, who ignore market rules and shake up current models.
Clearly, Kissinger would have benefited greatly from loyal policymakers, because to a large extent, the current state of the global economic system is simply the result of Goodhart’s law: we collectively chose a good metric (GDP, for example), but by making it our target and continuously optimizing it, we ended up in a situation where it ceased to be a good metric.
The Meaning Crisis and Bullshit
The rise in bullshit is a symptom of a deeper problem—a meaning crisis in modern society. As noted in the discussion, we live in an era of a “meaning crisis,” a total loss of meaning. When a person loses connection with genuine meaning, they begin to generate artificial meaning, filling the void with bullshit.
We can observe this process in all spheres of life:
Business: Companies create artificial “missions” and “values” unrelated to their actual operations
Social Media: People construct idealized versions of their lives
Education: Students learn not for knowledge but for grades and diplomas
Science: Researchers optimize for the number of publications rather than the quality of their research
Perhaps this is why bullshit is so hard to defeat—it fills an existential void created by the loss of genuine meaning.
Is There a Way Out?
In living systems, there is never absolute good without evil. By choosing all that is good and rejecting all that is bad, we don’t strengthen the system; we kill it. Perhaps the same is true of the information space—we need to learn to live with some level of uncertainty and ambiguity.
The solution may lie in creating new systems and institutions that encourage truthfulness and transparency. This is what we called the “Kissinger moment”—finding configurations where truth becomes beneficial to all participants. But this requires a systemic approach:
Personal level: Develop critical thinking and the ability to distinguish truth from bullshit
Organizational level: Foster a culture where honesty and integrity are valued above a flashy “package”
Technological level: Develop tools for cooperation and validation
Social level: Establish new norms and values where we rely less on speculation and bullshit
Perhaps it’s impossible, or even unnecessary, to completely rid ourselves of bullshit. But we can strive for a healthier balance between truth and fiction, between reality and its interpretations. After all, as experience shows, the most resilient systems are those that find a way to integrate opposites rather than trying to exclude one of them entirely.