Talk:Bullshit/Archives/2017

Who put the bull in papal?
How sacrilegious, how crude! The "bulls" of the Most Holy Papal See of Rome must be striken, yes striken, from this article at once! I am absolutely devastated. How could you? ;-) Scott P. (talk) 04:45, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Etymology
The term bullshit isn't a simple portmanteau?? 68.173.113.106 (talk) 19:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
 * This is probably true of 20th century American usage, but the term has complex origins. "Bull" was in use in England from the sixteenth century onwards meaning nonsense, presumably from Papal bull. The American usage spread back to Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. --Ef80 (talk) 10:08, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
 * "those monstrous opinions to be found in the Roman dunghill of decretals." - Martin Luther, 1520 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wikUZu9des&t=42m30s Featherwinglove (talk) 00:17, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

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The "bull" in "bullshit" is unrelated the "bull" meaning "a ludicrous jest." It is, as suggested, a portmanteau of "bull" (n.1 in the OED) "the male of any bovine animal", and "shit."

According to the OED, the "ludicrous jest" version (n.4) is is not derived from Papal Bull:

"No foundation appears for the guess that the word originated in ‘a contemptuous allusion to papal edicts’, nor for the assertion of the ‘British Apollo’ (No. 22. 1708) that ‘it became a Proverb from the repeated Blunders of one Obadiah Bull, a Lawyer of London, who liv'd in the Reign of K. Henry the Seventh’."

I'm sorry, but I don't know how to cite the OED, as I have the electronic version. Sudont (talk) 19:32, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

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Oh wait, I take that back. This is how they have in the OED:

''[f. bull n.1 + shit n.]

1.1 Rubbish, nonsense; = bull n.4 3.''

First they have it in the n.1 sense, then in the n.4 sense just below, so I'm not sure. Sudont (talk) 19:42, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

What of the use of bullshit in the literal sense, as a noun for cow feces? The usage of bullshit, cowshit, chickenshit, etc on farms and in rural areas is fairly common and without vulgar context in these scenarios. 72.192.115.161 (talk) 15:30, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * see Manure. IdreamofJeanie (talk) 15:32, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Calling bullshit on the bullshit asymmetry principle
The "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle" was already formulated by Economist Roy Radner in 1993 [1]. In his paper, he considered the performance of an organization that processes information in terms of (1) number of processors required to review data items and (2) the time delays associated with processing data items. These factors are considered as a function of (A) the number data items to process and (B) the rate at which they arrive. In this paper, Rader related the number of data items to be processed to the number of processors as well as the delays associated with processing the same number of data items. He establishes lower bounds for both relations and finds that the number of processors is at least proportional to the number of items to be processed and its not possible to maintain a constant delay with an increase in data items - there are strong decrease in the returns to scale with respect delays as the number of data items grows.

There might be objections that this considers the effort to get rid of bullshit. The effort involved in resolving the quality of goods or services has already been considered in the economic literature in terms of Search goods and experience goods.

I suppose one might argue that the length of this comment is an example of the bullshit asymmetry principle. But considering that a simple counter-example can refute a bullshit system composed of perhaps an infinite number of statements, I wouldn't make too much of it. At most this is a vague meme that caught on with twitter users.

More interesting: does it take more effort to look up to see the color of the sky or to say "the sky looks hot pink"?

[1] Radner, R. (1993). The Organization of Decentralized Information Processing. Econometrica, 61(5), 1109-1146. doi:10.2307/2951495 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cabaez (talk • contribs) 08:10, 9 November 2017 (UTC)