During a particular moment in my misspent youth, some friends and I were sitting around, actively mis-spending our youth. It was in one of our living rooms, maybe, or possibly on a porch somewhere. We were extremely stoned and communication was difficult.

We made an attempt to quantify this difficulty. It went like this. You are very stoned, and your high is affecting the way in which you express your thoughts. What’s coming out of your mouth isn’t exactly what you mean, because you’re too high to articulate clearly. I am also very stoned, and my high is affecting the way my brain processes information from my various senses. The understanding in my brain is not exactly an accurate representation of the sounds entering my ears, because I’m too high for perfect comprehension. The result is that our attempts at communication are rendered down into essentially meaningless bullshit.

We called this double-blind “the bullshit filter,” imagining it as a dual-membraned and possibly soap-bubble-shimmery boundary separating our individual minds and blocking the thoughts from becoming clear words on one side and the words from becoming clear understanding on the other.

I think about it a lot.

It’s a silly idea we had when we were stoned teenagers, and of course no actual membranes or filters existed. But I think we hit, metaphorically and with much clumsiness, on a Truth.

Much hay’s been made in recent times over echo chambers, alternative facts, various people choosing to live in seemingly disconnected versions of reality. I expect considerable further hay to be made, as the situation doesn’t seem poised for improvement. The advent of LLM generated content will exacerbate things, but the bullshit filter exists independently of any half baked tech innovations.

You, predisposed to a certain worldview, have interpreted the information available to you in a specific way and subsequently decided to hold forth. Your overall worldview affects the words you use to express that view. This may seem redundant, but different groups use different terms. They use different constructions for argument at times. There exists an abundance of sub-cultural lexicons. The more you associate yourself with any particular sub-culture, the more you adopt those quirks of speech.

And, if we’re being absolutely 100% honest here, the words you use to express any original, genuine thought may not necessarily be an exact match for the formation of that thought inside your brain.

I’m not talking about some kind of cognitive dissonance, here, and I’m not accusing anyone of being disingenuous. Lots of people are, all the damn time, but that’s not what I’m talking about now.

Those last two sentences are a preemptive attempt to combat the bullshit filter.

Because on the other end of the equation, how you view the world affects how you process incoming information. And there’s lots of factors there, from the bedrock understanding of facts that underpins your whole viewpoint all the way down to how you view the person speaking to you coloring your willingness and even ability to actually fucking hear them.

I’m going to try a non-specific, non-real-world example. It may or may not work, because my side of the bullshit filter makes it difficult for me to craft what I’m seeing in my head properly into English words.

But let’s say you, a proud member of Group A, have become convinced that many if not most members of Group B are secretly polar bears in elaborate disguise. The polar bears would be quite happy, you believe, to see the return of Ice Age type conditions. You, understandably, oppose the New Glaciated Order agenda quite vehemently.

Now, say your coworker is a member of Group B. Lowkey, doesn’t spout off about it at the water cooler every five seconds, but you’ve seen the t-shirts they wear Casual Friday. Your coworker doesn’t seem to be an arctic ursine in an ill-fitting man-suit, but he or she certainly sympathizes with the bears.

Your bear-loving coworker tries to have a conversation with you about global warming. They’re probably trying to express some kind of factual information, and in doing so they’re using the language of their tribe – because that’s the language they learned this factual information in. Maybe they have a deeper understanding of it, maybe they originally planned on a career in meteorology or even climate science directly. Maybe they have a deep, scientifically-literate understanding of what they’re trying to get across. But they’re going to use the words, and if you didn’t know they were a bear-lover yet, you do now because you recognize bear-words.

You’re going to completely dismiss their information, because it’s rather crisp out today, and obviously polar bears want it to be even colder.

No, this isn’t a great hypothetical. It’s too easily mapped onto non-hypothetical scenarios, too easily recognizable. I’ve tripped up and used bear words. And now, no matter what it was I was actually trying to get across with my poorly constructed thought experiment, a certain segment of the population knows I like bears and am therefore not to be trusted. Everything I’ve said is suspect. There may be hidden meaning, coded messages to my fellow ursine sympathizers. Properly alerted, perhaps you can find them.

There are no hidden messages, although I’m the sort of smart ass who, if I’d thought of it earlier, would definitely have put some silly bear puns in the earlier paragraphs for shits and giggles. This would not have illustrated my point. My point is they’re not there, but if you convinced yourself they were you would probably find them.

And that’s the bullshit filter, friends and neighbors.