In his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James writes:
James is addressing how good certain ballplayers are in “clutch situations” and how much weight this should be given in valuing their contribution. Clutch ability is hard to define precisely, so fans can claim that their favorite guy is great in the clutch without really having to validate anything. From my own experience, I would argue that culture is something of a bullshit dump. When I was trying to explain certain things to my Chinese roommates back in grad school (say, the major scale in Western music), the logic of why certain things worked would only go so far before someone would just say “it’s cultural” and that would be that. Going further was very difficult.
Calling something a bullshit dump in James’ formulation doesn’t automatically invalidate that area of inquiry, but it does serve notice that one is venturing into ill-defined territory. Champions of Ronald Reagan’s presidency will often state that he restored pride to America. This is something of a bullshit dump; it cannot be measured in terms of GDP, percent of population under the poverty line, paid attendance at NFL games, flag sales, or anything like that. This lack of precision doesn’t make make the statement wrong, but it runs dangerously close to not being falsifiable, and thus not valid.
Is there a better term for this sort of thing than James’ scatalogical term? I like the concept, but would like to use language more inclusive of broader audiences.
In the quote, I’d say it’s excluded middle/false dilemma. Whatever they’re speaking about can either be explained or it’s too complicated to explain. Clearly there’s a middle ground there. I’m not sure if it’s a fallacy, but it almost sounds like someone trying to explain something and as the other person questions them on it they become aware of how much they don’t know about it an/or realize they can’t explain it well enough and cut off the conversation with “it’s just the way it is” or “god works in mysterious ways”, almost as a way to save face knowing that (even if they’re right), if they continue to explain themselves, they’ll be proven incorrect because they simply don’t know enough about the subject.
Said differently, the author is talking about being vague. Your friends using the word clutch are [or could be] using it to be vague because statistics can be shot down. Telling people your best friend is cool won’t get you a bunch of follow up questions, but those people are going to pick your best friend apart if instead of saying he’s cool, you explain why he’s cool.
FTR, I’m not even sure if any of this really makes sense.
There is more than one effect in play here. A lot of it is the ‘convenient explanation’ that we would prefer to have instead of the complexities of reality. People want to believe in clutch performers of any kind, and there are many in different walks of life, and clutch performance is seen as an admirable quality that we’d like to apply to ballplayers in the late innings of a game but statistics tell us clutch performance is barely more than chance if anything at all. So many people wanted to believe that Reagan was restoring something lost in America, just as many believe that about Trump now, but an examination of the facts show a lot of confirmation bias, forgetfulness, and wishful thinking. And some of it is not bullshit but mere chickenshit, no different than discussing the weather.