Thread by @callin_bull

A recent @accenture advertisement appeared on my timeline as a promoted tweet and got me thinking about the evolution of bullshit.

The text is a perfect example of what we call *old-school bullshit*. It's a vapid jumble of jargon, neologism, and manager-speak. 1/n

It's not a one-off, either. Look at this bullshit bonanza!
newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture…

2/n

Increasingly, this rubbish is being replaced by *new-school bullshit*. New school BS uses the language of math and stats to create an impression of rigor and accuracy. Dubious claims are given a veneer of legitimacy by glossing them with equations, numbers, and data graphics. 3/n

We pretty much teach a whole course on new-school bullshit, but today I want to think about the evolution of bullshit *equations*. At perhaps the most innocuous levels, those intending to impress people sometimes present real and meaningful equations without adequate context. 4/n

Getting worse, there are loose qualitative ideas written in the form of equations to make them seem scientific, but without the underlying rigor or even coherence of units. Drozdeck and Fisher's "Trust Equation" strikes us as a premier example. 5/n

Sure, as indicated by the equation it may be that trust increases with C, R, and I, while decreasing with D. But what are the units of Trust? Why are Credibility, Reliability, and Intimacy *additively* associated? Why is there an inverse relationship with self-orientation? 6/n

What about a dispassionate but fundamentally random oracle? A fair coin is has no self-interest or self-orientation whatsoever, and thus the Trust Equation where such is involved takes an infinitely large value. Should we put infinite trust in a a fair coin? 7/n

And then we get formulae that look OK but are basically made up at random. You see this from professors writing on blackboards in comic strips.*

(That's OK, because they're comic strip characters! They're not writing equations to convince you of their authority.)

8/n

Bringing things full circle, @accenture takes it to the next level on their website promoting the SynOps "human-machine operating engine". 9/n

Look at these equations. Φ=∀ x ∃ y ψ(x,y) ?

It might look like math from a distance, and maybe it looks like math to some advertising executive, but it's a random assemblage of symbols with actual meanings into a statement that is not just meaningless but ungrammatical. 10/n

What does it say about a firm's esteem for their customers that they promulgate this kind of nonsense?

Are there really managers out there who see this stuff and think "Wow, I'm going to hire these guys because they must know a lot of math?" 11/n

This isn't "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Nor even "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless…
It's more like "The also he dog slowly and."
And that, friends, is the latest in new-school bullshit.

We might even call it "the new applied now." 12/n