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scientists claim to have identified the most common practitioners of the ignoble art. Their study of 40,000 teenagers reveals that boys; those from privileged backgrounds; and North Americans in particular, top the charts as the worst offenders.

Jerrim analysed data gathered by the OECD to assess how well 15-year-olds around the globe have mastered key academic subjects.

For one of the questions, the teenagers must rate how familiar they are with 16 mathematical concepts ranging from polygons and vectors to quadratic functions and congruent figures. Hidden among the bona fide terms are three fakes: proper numbers, subjective scaling and declarative functions

Students who are wealthier and male are more likely than others to claim that they know more than they actually do, says a new study.

The study, which reviewed surveys of 40,000 15-year-old students from across nine English-speaking countries, found that boys and people from wealthier families are more likely to be “bullshitters,” which it defines as “individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience at all.”

“You’re claiming expertise in things you have absolutely no knowledge of,” says Shure. “You couldn’t. These things don’t exist.”

This is an unfortunate and pernicious pattern. Musk often refers to himself as moderate or independent, but he routinely treats far-right fringe figures as people worth taking seriously—and, more troublingly, as reliable sources of information.

By doing so, he boosts their messages: A message retweeted by or receiving a reply from Musk will potentially be seen by millions of people.

Also, people who pay for Musk’s Twitter Blue badges get a lift in the algorithm when they tweet or reply; because of the way Twitter Blue became a culture war front, its subscribers tend to skew to the righ

Musk is not wrong that Twitter is chock-full of noise and garbage, but the most pernicious stuff comes from real people and a media ecosystem that amplifies and rewards incendiary bullshit

This dynamic is far more of a problem for Twitter (but also the news media and the internet in general) than shadowy bot farms are. But it’s also a dilemma without much of a concrete solution

Were Musk actually curious or concerned with the health of the online public discourse, he might care about the ways that social media platforms like Twitter incentivize this behavior and create an information economy where our sense of proportion on a topic can be so easily warped. But Musk isn’t interested in this stuff, in part because he is a huge beneficiary of our broken information environment and can use it to his advantage to remain constantly in the spotlight.

This type of glib quasi-logic works really well in comedy, especially in a format where space is restricted, and where the quick, disposable nature of the strip limits your ability to draw humor from character and plot. You take an idea, find a way to subvert or deconstruct it, and you get an absurd result.

while the idea of a “cubicle job” can seem to younger readers like relative bliss, they were (and are) still an emblem of boredom and absurdity, a sign that life was being slowly colonized by gray shapes and Powerpoint slides. Throughout his classic-era work, Adams hits on the feeling that the world has been made unnatural, unconducive to life; materially adequate, but spiritually exhausting. 

He makes constant use of something I’m going to call, for want of a better term, the sophoid: something which has the outer semblance of wisdom, but none of the substance; something that sounds weighty if you say it confidently enough, yet can be easily thrown away as “just a thought” if it won’t hold up to scrutiny.

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio.

Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

Some people correctly perceive something like a frat party full of blackface as wrongheaded, file it under "cultural appropriation," and adopt the erroneous heuristic that any appropriation of a culture is wrongheaded. When the chef who staffs the dining hall at their college serves sushi, they see injustice where there is none. Conversely, other folks see a protest over sushi, perceive that it is absurd, see it filed under cultural appropriation, and adopt the bad heuristic that any grievance lodged under that heading is bullshit. Later, when their Facebook stream unearths a story about blackface headlined, "These Frat Boys Are Guilty of Cultural Appropriation," they erroneously conclude that nothing wrongheaded occurred. Perhaps they even ignorantly add a dismissive comment, exacerbating the canard that racial animus or dehumanization is a nonissue.

major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle

Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.

At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.