I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor’s degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about…

… doesn’t sit right with my experience. If you can prove something beyond doubt, it isn’t science by definition: it might be mathematics. The philosophy of science is itself a minefield, but for me a scientific argument consists of a truthful and as far as possible unbiased set of observations supporting a model, where that model itself makes falsifiable predictions.

Substitute “observations” with “quotations” and “model” with “worldview”, neither of which is too much of a stretch, and that sounds to me awfully like the process of the criticism you’re describing. You’ve lost falsifiability, sure, and means the conclusions you draw aren’t scientific – but the process by which you draw them doesn’t appear, on the surface, so different.

Maybe a lot of criticism is bad, or at least lacks rigour. I’m not qualified to talk about that. However, you could certainly argue that enough of the science out there is a bit one-eyed in its assessments. Maybe the boundary Blow’s talking about is really between the certainty of mathematics and the uncertainty of everything else? I don’t know.

“For the essence of bullshit is not that it is _false_ but that it is _phony_. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing [...] what is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made [...] The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong”.

The crucial thing here is the “how it was made” part. Criticism at its core is stating what you think about things – and as you rise through the Education/Professional world there may be more rigor, but there are also incentives that start to conflict with criticism at its rawest. You do not get paid as a Critic (nor do you get a Degree) for saying that you have nothing interesting to say about a subject, even though that may be the case.

In addition, your thought is modulated by the environment in which you are writing. The first essay you write at University may be worse than the last, but _in some sense_ it is more honest – it hasn’t picked up the style, references and concerns that are not really your own, and that one absorbs almost unconciously. Looking back at some of my essays today, I think that Bullshit is exactly what they are.

It is not that all criticism is Bullshit, it is more that it _can_ be, and it is hard to work out which is which because it depends so much on the intention of the writer.

I have to say, one of the problems I have about his spiel is his seeming inconsistency – first he pillories game designers for being unethical in their reward structures and name-drops Italo Calvino, then he (apparently?) calls out literature as “bullshitty,” and belittles arts-major-types as being out of touch with the Way The World Really Works. I find Braid to be a pretty compelling game and a great conversation piece, but ultimately I think it suffers from the same flaws as Blow consistently seems to: namely, resorting to self-congratulation and – worse – intellectual bullying at the drop of a hat.

I once had an English professor that explained his role as that of a gatekeeper, in that he would turn back (i.e. fail) anyone who was unworthy. I couldn’t stand the guy; brains are not something to be wielded like a club.

Ding ding ding. That makes me consider my own relationship with maths; practically speaking, I’m hopeless beyond arithmetic, but at the same time, philosophically speaking, I’m in awe of mathematics as the language of the universe. I think it’s a distinction that’s lost on far too many.