Definitely A Technical Exercise In Academic Philosophy
Last updated: 5/16/2026 | Originally published: 5/16/2026
So this week, as I continue reading “great works that are often referenced but not often read”1 Refer to “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” last week. (is this actually a series? who knows), I finally read Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.
First off: did you know this book is like 80 A6 pages? It’s basically a long essay2 It originally was an essay, I believe, and only later republished in book form. and you can read it in half an hour.
But also: unlike “The Two Cultures”, I’m not sure I got much more out of reading it than reading the one line summary. To wit: if you know anything about On Bullshit, you probably know it for its definition of bullshit as opposed to lying. Lying is when you’re trying to convince someone of a falsehood that you know is false; bullshit is when you simply don’t care whatsoever about the truth or falsehood of what you’re saying. (And then any article mentioning this usually goes on to discuss how this applies to Trump, who is, by this definition, the bullshitter par excellence.)
Watching Frankfurt work around to this definition is interesting in and of itself — and involves an amusing Wittgenstein anecdote in which he is angered by his friend describing herself as feeling “like a dog that had been hit by a truck” (because how would she know what a dog hit by a truck felt like?) — but definitely a technical exercise in academic philosophy. For most people just having the frame of “bullshit is when the speaker doesn’t care about the truth of what they’re saying” is 99.9% of the value of On Bullshit. So: glad he wrote it, but not a must-read, but also short enough that you might as well.
Perhaps next I’ll move on to what Naomi Kanakia has described as “this year’s guy”, Walter Ong. Or maybe I’ll finally pick up Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. The world is my oyster!
Okay, one other side note. Although I love “slop” as a definition for carelessly-deployed LLM output, I do almost wish I resided in the world where the philosophically-correct “bullshit” had won out instead. Just imagine the glee with which The Verge reporters could talk about Sam Altman as a bullshit-slinger.
New on the website: I’ve added a little popover to jump to categories, instead of the old /map page that did the same function. I expect this to be useful to myself and approximately no one else, but sometimes you have to make yourself happy, right?
This week Marcin Wichary posted a massive guide to keyboard customization which was not quite technical enough for my purposes3 I already know what VIA is, for instance. but is a useful general guide to creating new keyboard shortcuts and setting up a macropad and the like.
However! I call it out because he points to a cute free app called CustomShortcuts, which lets you set up macOS-wide custom hotkeys for menu items, with autocomplete, without having to open Settings’ atrocious “Keyboard shortcuts” page (!!!). If you’ve ever been annoyed by a default keybinding in macOS this is how you should change it.