Brandolini’s Law, The Academic Drip, and First Principles
Bullshit! Humbug! There’s a lot of it floating around these days in the performance field. I strongly recommend reading the short book titled “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt. In it, he describes the ideas first coined by Max Black in an article titled “The Prevalence of Humbug.” Humbug, or bullshit, is deliberate misrepresentation exposed in the cloak of pretentious language. Frankfurt states:
“Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts, or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he’s up to.”
From my 20 years of experience in the performance field this is happening in areas of research such as long-term athlete development, teaching pedagogy, and in emerging technologies. The time it takes to refute humbug, far exceeds the amount of time it takes to produce it. This is Brandolini’s Law, or the bullshit asymmetry principle. My strong recommendation to combat this is a foundational understanding of first principles! What are they? Programming (technical/tactical), physiology, physics, phycology, and biomechanics. Have a foundational understanding of them all. Be a Swiss army knife.
An old paraphrase from Charlie Francis comes to mind: “A sports scientist’s job is to tell me....why what I’m doing works (or not).” The problems start with the coach, not the researcher, not the tech company! Why solve problems that don’t exist in the first place?
Science starts and ends with problems. Coaches need to start the process, not academia and technology
When you do read the research, don’t be overcome with pretentious verbiage, unpack it with common sense. No one is perfect. We all get fooled. It happens all the time!
“In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy.
Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.”
Book: Fashionable Nonsense
This too is happening right now in the world of sports performance.
