Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
*
1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence.
2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.
3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person.
4. You are not only responsible for the things you say, but also for the things that you do not say.
5. Health and tolerance provides creativity for the future.
6. We have other flaws before our eyes, but our own flaws behind our back.
7. Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in.
8. Your movement transforms universal observations.
9. The person who never made a mistake never tried something new.
10. The whole silence infinite phenomena.
11. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.
12. The invisible is beyond all new immutability.
13. The unexplainable touches on the inherent experiences of the universe.
14. It is one thing to be tempted, but quite another to fall for the temptation.
*
Here are the answers for self-assessment: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=l...
No claim is made on the validity of the experiment (the researchers' or your own). Proposed in the name of curiosity!
(If you're finding it TLDR then at least skip to the list of numbered propositions in the middle)
A "nosology of thought" sounds like a fine research program, but a manifesto about it ought to at least give a few examples to show the criteria for helpful diagnostics.
I like the dialog with Muggeridge at the end, though.
1. The river cuts through a rock because its power is above some threshold where it causes more than zero damage, and the damage multiplied by the persistence (time spent) is what it does to the rock. (Compare the photoelectric effect; if the photons are too weak, they don't do anything no matter how many you have.) Of course, a scientist probably wouldn't use that language.
2. A human who sees a hidden meaning in something may transform their opinion of something's beauty. A grain of truth under bullshit phrasing.
3. ... Now this I can't think of a non-bullshit interpretation for. The future hasn't happened yet, so it doesn't tell you anything, certainly not anything surprising, until it happens and then it's no longer the future.
4. True, though kind of tautological.
5. Health helps a brain be capable of creativity, sure. Tolerance helps not squash other people's creativity. Eh, it's kinda true.
6. I assume "other flaws" is meant to be "others' flaws". There is truth to this: at least for some kinds of flaws, it's easier to see them in others than in oneself.
7. See also "you can lead a horse to water...". Has a valid truth: I think most kinds of learning work much better when the learner is participating.
8. Um... ... universal observations? Like mathematical facts, or facts about the Sun that anyone can see? But my movement doesn't transform them. Bullshit.
9. Almost certainly true.
10. That isn't a sentence. If I try auto-correcting to "the whole silences infinite phenomena"... I guess you could E-prime-ify it to "a human who observes the whole may lose sight of the many little interesting details"... meh. I'm probably reading more insight into it than the author made an honest attempt to convey. Bullshit. By the way, I'm now suspecting an alternating bullshit/non-bullshit pattern.
11. I think this has a lot of truth to it, though it might not be true in all cases.
12. New immutability? What? I'm suspecting some of these are taken from http://wisdomofchopra.com/.
13. Ehm... one could say that we experience a lot of things without understanding (or being able to explain) most of them. "inherent experiences" sounds like experiences that every conceivable being has, which I'm not sure exist other than "the experience of consciousness and cognition", which beings probably must have in order to qualify as beings, but which are probably felt much differently by different beings. So no.
14. Agreed.
And, looking at the results... Yup, makes sense.
You are risking DoS attack, steelmanning statements from untrusted sources.
That works as a sentence even without the change. "The whole " can be parsed as "People who are whole".
I guess I can see how this might be classed as "not bullshit", but I don't see how it's profound at all. It just seems false to me.
I agreed with all the other classifications.
edit: I know complaining about downvotes is verboten here, but seriously, that's just my take on it. I'd be interested to hear an explanation of what the profound meaning is that I'm missing here.
Also, we clearly can distinguish imaginary pain from real pain. For example, there's a difference between the real pain I feel if I stub my toe and the imaginary pain I "feel" if I imagine myself stubbing my toe.
So it may be quite a bullshit statement, depending on how you take it.
Alternatively, someone with a mental condition that leads them to believe they are in pain would conceivably feel the same pain as someone who is actually being physically hurt.
Just my take on it.
That's exactly the point of the sentence.
It does. But read what the sentence says about "imaginary pain"—that it still hurts. That feeling of hurt is pain. So the sentence is saying that "imaginary pain" is just "pain". So pain that you might think is imaginary, is actually real.
That's exactly what you're getting wrong. "Imaginary pain" does not mean "imagining a situation where imaginary-you is in pain". It means pain with imaginary causes that applies to the real you.
Most people in this thread see it as real physical pain conjured up by one's imagination - so things like psychosomatic pain, pain caused by mental illness, pain caused by fears, etc. So think of someone getting dizzy from their fear of heights, or a hoarder doubled over retching because someone is throwing away parts of their hoard.
Whereas you in essence think that it's an oxymoron - if it's real pain, it by definition can't be imaginary. So it's just a thought exercise or a theatrical performance.
So maybe the sentence would be less bullshitty if it read "irrational pain" or something like that.
But as most people read "imaginary pain" as "real pain felt, without reason" instead of "fake pain you're just imagining about", I think your reading of "imaginary" is too parsimonious.
No, I think that there is such a thing as imaginary pain, just as there is such a thing as an imaginary elephant. You can imagine being in pain. You can imagine an elephant. But if someone said "imaginary elephants weigh just as much as real elephants", I would be confused (unless they just meant that the imagined weight of the imagined elephant was equal to the weight of the real elephant).
I guess you could debate whether that is "imagined".
2) Do we know that phantom limb pain does not hurt less than the corresponding non-phantom pains? It seems entirely possible that while phantom limb pain is very acute, it's not as actually as bad as the pain associated with losing the limb in the first place.
3) Even waiving 1 and 2, that would be one rather obscure instance of an imaginary pain and a real pain having the same intensity, which would in no way establish the truth of the general statement.
I was still wrong, because I categorize them differently (not that one is necessarily easier to deal with than the other).
In the end it comes down to semantics either way.
One thing I found interesting is how incredibly subjective and relative painful experiences are. Increasing and varied types of pain would typically be inflicted over the course of an experiment, while I had to perform various tasks and grade the pain on a scale from 0-10.
Very often I'd grade the initial pain around 6-7, and increase that to the maximum of 9-10 during the experiment. The pain I experienced by the end would however be much more severe, and if I could've corrected the initial grading it'd have been closer to 2-3.
I guess you could say that I was unable to imagine the level of pain I'd later experience, and how relative pain is perceived in this type of experiment.
Just a tangential anecdote, but I didn't call BS on that statement :)
In any case, the sentence doesn't seem to require the imaginary pain to be equivalent (or even compared) to the pain experienced from whatever is causing the imaginary pain. I don't think that's even possible.
It just requires that the pain someone experience from imagining/actually being tortured hurts just as much, albeit likely differently, regardless of the nature or cause of the pain ("imagined"/"real").
The "profoundness" of the sentence is probably related to the already questionable concept "imagined pain"; and how the pain experienced by other people can easily, and way to often, be dismissed and classified as "imaginary".
The pain still hurts the person experiencing it though, regardless of whether some might call it imaginary (and whether "imaginary pain" even makes sense).
Right, but imagining being tortured doesn't hurt just as much as being tortured. That is why the sentence strikes me as obviously false.
>The pain still hurts the person experiencing though, regardless of whether some might call it imaginary.
Yes, people might disagree about whether or not someone is in pain. Similarly, they might disagree about whether or not someone is eating cake. That doesn't mean that "imaginary cake tastes just as good as real cake".
That might be the case, but it's probably not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison, for the sentence to be true, would be between "The imagined pain experienced from thinking about torture" and "The pain experienced from thinking about torture".
Or to put it another way (in the same format as the sentence we're debating): "The imagined pain experienced from thinking about torture does not hurt less than the pain experienced from thinking about torture".
I think the profoundness here is more related to the word "imaginary" being unnecessary (and even harmful) as it relates to suffering. My sentence above might make it more obvious that "imaginary pain" is somewhat ridiculous in the first place, but it is however used to dismiss people who are hurting.
> Yes, people might disagree about whether or not someone is in pain. Similarly, they might disagree about whether or not someone is eating cake. That doesn't mean that "imaginary cake tastes just as good as real cake".
If a person is conscious and claim to be in pain, that person is in pain, and it doesn't matter if other people think differently.
Similarly, if someone is eating cake it's just weird for anyone else to disagree that they're eating cake, or even discuss the difference between the taste of cake and thinking about eating cake. People of course rarely question the reality and experiences associated with eating cake, but they do with people experiencing pain, which makes the sentence more insightful than you seem to believe.
In a sense this also kinda leads to the result of the study: I do see a point in the statement (and the other non-BS statements), and I think it's a lot more likely that I'll engage in prosocial behavior, such as relieving someone from pain others may describe and dismiss as "imaginary" - or for that matter giving someone the cake they want/need, whether that be real or imaginary ;)
I don't understand what the comparison is supposed to be there. You can't "experience" imagined pain. If you're saying that you can imagine being in lots of pain, and that imagining this scenario isn't itself painful, then of course everyone agrees with that. But this is a banal observation, and one that seems to contradict the original sentence.
>People of course rarely question the reality and experiences associated with eating cake, but they do with people experiencing pain, which makes the sentence more insightful than you seem to believe.
If you're saying "we should generally believe people when they say they're in pain", then sure, I agree with that. It's just not what the sentence we're discussing says.
Consider that you understood the statement without complaint of ambiguity, enough to question the truth of the assertion and discuss that with other people without your having to impart your own meaning that you construct. And consider the gyrations and gymnastics that people are applying in this very discussion to impart their own meanings to the other statements that are without consistent unambiguous meaning.
To question whether it should properly be called profound would be, conversely, to question the paper's methodology. There is, as I said, a definition of bullshit. There is no equivalent definition of profundity. Nor were test subjects asked to evaluate the sentences with an explicit profundity criterion. The so-called profoundness-receptivity metric was actually a measurement of bullshit-receptivity of non-bullshit statements.
Yes, because it's difficult for a statement to be both profound and obviously false.
I just said that it's obviously false, so I don't understand why it is labeled "profound" in the paper. That's it.
The underlying point is that whether you think that someone's suffering (physical or emotional) has a real or imaginary cause, that doesn't make them suffer any more or less, because you are not in their head, and they are not in yours. Their degree of suffering depends on their perception of reality, not yours, or even objective reality.
The statement is an appeal to empathy.
Apparently, I'm a highly functioning sociopath then ;).
If you're going by effort, it seems that your interpretation is anything but simpler or lower effort.
If you're trying to make the point that the statement could have been phrased better, I don't think anyone would disagree with you.
Hmm? You seem to be mixing up the effort required to reach that interpretation with the effort required to argue with other people about whether it's the correct interpretation.
#11 counters people's default assumption that imagined pain doesn't hurt, because it's not real. You gain more understanding of people who report imagined pain by assuming it hurts the same (even if it might actually hurt a little less) than by assuming it doesn't hurt at all.
In the book Dune, Paul Atreides' hand is put in a pain-simulating device and he has to demonstrate his humanity by resisting the urge to pull it out or he'll be killed by a cyanide needle in the neck. You can only understand that scene by assuming the simulated pain hurts as much as real pain.
That sentence may be obviously true, but it is not vacuous.
You can't grade pain on an objective scale based on what caused it. It's a subjective experience, and therefore if you truly imagine it, it exists.
>It's a subjective experience, and therefore if you truly imagine it, it exists.
Nope, I can imagine being in pain without being in pain. Similarly, taste is subjective, but I can't satisfy my appetite for chocolate by imagining eating it.
Basically this: http://www.robot-hugs.com/helpful-advice/
Believing pain to not be lesser because it comes from psychosomatic sources is reasonably - Most people will act similarly in my experience, and in any case the statement is saying something
Contrast that with the bullshit statements - “The whole silence infinite phenomena”
The point seems to be more about being able to detect that the “bullshit” sentences are completely and utterly meaningless despite being (for the most part) grammatically correct and sounding similarly woo-ish to the “profound” ones on the surface.
This statement confuses cause (some damage) and effect (pain) and so should be in the bullshit category, or else it's poorly written/translated.
An imagined cause may lead to real pain, for example if you believe you've been betrayed but you haven't. The pain is the same as if you had actually been betrayed, and in both cases that pain isn't imagined, it's a real mental, neurological phenomenon.
But the only pain that's imagined is pain that's not happening to us, like someone else's pain and future pain, and sorry but despite all sympathy and fear, yeah that does usually hurt a lot less.
Same as 'irrational fears are scary despite being irrational', or 'imaginary fears are scary despite being imaginary'.
By the same logic, I can feel happy just by imagining myself feeling happy?
Responding to your edit:
>whether there is even a difference between feeling happy and “being” happy.
That's not the question. The question is whether there's a difference between feeling happy and imagining yourself feeling happy.
If you answer, well laughter is physical while pain is mental, then I will ask you how that is a genuine dichotomy. The mental representation of unexperienced pain is also, in truth, a physical phenomenon since the mind is a physical experience, but the mental representation of pain is not the same as experienced pain.
But pain or pleasure, sadness or happiness from some imagined event, yes, that's real and it's what the original sentence intended to say, I believe.
Edit: This was meant as a reply to addicted rather than foldr...
We can imagine other people's pain, however, or hypothetical pain, and that is not the same as experiencing pain itself.
However, I get that the most effective torture doesn't rely on actual physical pain. The worst thing is the knowledge that one is being permanently disfigured. And that's all about imagining the future.
Can I call BS on getting the first its right and the 2nd one wrong?
On that subject, I would have classified 5 differently but it seems to be the highest score of the BS sentences so I guess it's debatable
> 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person.
I'm not a native English speaker, so I might be wrong, but I'm reading this as "the future will more likely reveal the truth to those who are open-minded" which seems to be too profound to be bullshit. Of course, "irrational fact" is an awkward way to refer to false beliefs, but awkwardness≠bullshit.
The one that tripped me up was “imagined pain hurts not less because its imagined” Is that saying people who suffer psychologically actually suffer? Or should i take it at face bullshit value?
Basically if I couldn't understand and agree with or accept the statements at first glance then I considered them bullshit. It was an accurate result except for statement 5 with which I agreed.
"Only by looking into the future will you find inconvenient/perplexing/complex/weird/unbelievable/seemingly paradoxical/unwanted truths/facts"
Where the "irrational fact" is very open to interpretation, however.
I did mark it as bullshit though, it's way way way too open to interpretation. It could be poetry, if presented in a reasonable context, I suppose.
Metaphors are written to be interpreted more narrowly.
It's ... the difference is like going to an art museum, and on one wall, you have a painting featuring something recognizable as a person carrying a glass of water in a desert, and on the opposite wall, you have a blank canvas. There are multiple ways to interpret the painting of the person in the desert, and it'll have slightly different meanings to different people, but most of those will follow a similar theme. That painting has content. The blank canvas is intended for people to stare at it and invent their own meaning. It has no content. It's bullshit.
1 False, there is no persistence in the absence of power
2 False, the hidden/unknown has no transformative effect unless it is revealed
3 Missing information, what are 'irrational facts'?
4 Highly debatable, situational
5 False, creativity is not bound to either health or tolerance but modified through their experience.
6 Flowery way to say we like to shift perspective unto flaws that are not our own? We certainly have a track record when it comes to this behavior. Still not universally true.
7 You cannot be forced to learn. Context dependent.
8 Universal observations? Movement as in 'through life' (experience)? Our observations are contextualized by past experiences. Unsure about this sentence.
9 The person who has never tried anything literally died in the womb.
10 Missing context.
11 Being in pain is painful, 'imagined pain' makes no sense.
12 What, missing context.
13 What is 'the inherent experience of the universe'? Can the unexplainable touch anything?
14 Correct, being temped can be interpreted to be done unto you, not falling for temptation is the act of resisting it. There is *a difference*.
Jokes aside, I do like to help people out but won't go out of my way to seek opportunities to do so.
This one annoys me, because of it's ether/or proposition when it is more of a and/or function.
Yes, water including rivers cuts through rocks in more than one way. For example, Ph differences in the water can cause chemical weathering of the rock. In general these effects happen slowly and need to be persistent for any measurable effect.
But to deny the absolute power of a raging torrent and the amount of physical landscape change it is capable of in just moments is absolute folly. A swift river full of sand and chunks of rock can act like a water cutter or a sand blaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods are a testament to the power of water.
Persistence can be key to accomplishing something significant you don't feel capable of.
Or am I being too charitable?
As well, it anthropormorphizes the effect of gravity on water as 'persistence.' It might serve as a fine metaphor for human persistence but that's all.
I think it's key to read it a specific (overly charitable?) light.
You kind of have to take for granted that it's good advice in context. Someone is feeling discouraged and incapable facing come significant task and the best advice is to not be distracted by the feelings of incapability but rather persevere.
If you're reading it as statement on the relationship between power and persistence .. um .. you're missing it's point. Whether you agree or think it isn't well communicated is besides the point a little bit.
If you have to spend a minute thinking about erosion first then it loses its punch.
That's what it's intended to do. It's not trying to be a statement about Geology.
It's like taking issue with another of the profound statements: "Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in."
"Well, no," you point out, "you could be carried in by the teacher. Or maybe you're in a wheelchair and you need to wheel in."
The door, and stepping, in this case, are to be understood metaphorically. So is the river and the rock.
As no engineer ever said, "The house built from enlightenment has insufficient amps coming into the breaker panel."
The philosopher makes a profound statement that less sophisticated thinkers can understand. The engineer just builds a hydraulic cutter that is remarkable in its system to keep the silicon carbide grit slurry from clotting in the supply lines, and asks which river rock you want sliced up.
Intentionally missing the point is a form of trolling. And it's super fun when it's deflating the pomposity out of someone.
This actually caught me and I found myself trying to game the test itself.
For the first one, I was like "Yeah, it's true and is saying that persistence is important if you want to achieve your goals, but it's kind of a bullshitty way to say it" And then reading the rest, they all felt like they belonged on posters of silhouetted people looking over mighty vistas. So I declared the entire exercise a trick question.
Also. Water saws are fucking scary.
Basically the test is immune to this kind of criticism, because it's only interested in your response to it.
And lo and behold if you "troll" it by declaring it all bullshit, you're a type A engineer willing to argue over meaningless things, which certainly isn't very prosocial, whatever value it otherwise brings.
Framing of questions always affects the outcome of answers.
Lastly, a few of these read like the Chopra quote generator. http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/
I interpreted this one as referencing doppler shift of light emitted by celestial objects due to relative motion, but apparently I was overthinking this.
That said, the phrase remains mostly meaningless without more context; I'm certainly not trying to defend the phrase itself.
They're otherwise pretty obvious.
There has to be a typo here, right?
I marked this as “bullshit” because it doesn’t make sense. But the link says it’s not bullshit...
The BS ones on the other hand are totally meaningless (to me , atleast) like -
"The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty."
Like WTF?
Something has 'abstract beauty' (as opposed to concrete, surface beauty) through some conceptual significance it contains; however, once you look more, there is a deeper hidden meaning to the concepts, which changes the beauty into something else.
Not BS! Take for instance, E=mc^2. Thought of as a beautiful equation by many in the sciences. But, one of the hidden meanings is you can make an atomic weapon using it, which transforms it to horror.
Come on people, this is just loosely correlated with donating time and money to charity in a study that has decent odds of having primarily been done to grab headlines - don't take it too personally, and maybe go donate if you're really that concerned. Don't feel too defined by a 13 question true/false quiz.
(Disclaimer: I fall in the "1 wrong" group)
first sentence for example, any engineer knows that strong water jets can precisely cut steel in seconds, much better than any persistent river over several generations.
Also, they picked the most subjective "pro-social" measurements. It boils down to "volunteering" (time or money), no matter to what (can have been antifa, MAGA, etc)
I agree the whole thing is dubious, but that's a pretty weird criticism to pick out. The sentence specifically says "river" and is true of rivers; the fact that water jet cutters exist is irrelevant.
The aphorism concerns a river, not an industrial cutting machine.
Is there a better demonstration of American pragmatism?
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. Their frequent and loud use of this word to interrupt lectures, dialogs, private conversations, etc., exacerbated the divide between Procian and Halikaarnian orders that characterized the mathic world in the years leading up to the Third Sack. Shortly before the Third Sack, all of theKnights of Saunt Halikaarn were Thrown Back, so little more is known about them (their frequent appearance in Sæcular entertainments results from confusion between them and the Incanters).
Usage note: In the mathic world, if the word is suddenly shouted out in a chalk hall or refectory it brings to mind the events associated with sense (3) and is therefore to be avoided. Spoken in a moderate tone of voice, it takes on sense (2), which long ago lost any vulgar connotations it may once have had. In the Sæculum it is easily confused with sense (1) and deemed a vulgarity or even an obscenity. It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt- talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places the mathic observer in a nearly impossible position. One is forced either to use this “offensive” word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becoming a purveyor of bulshytt oneself and thereby lending strength to what one is trying to attack. The latter quality probably explains the uncanny stability and resiliency of bulshytt. Resolving this dilemma is beyond the scope of this Dictionary and is probably best left to hierarchs who make it their business to interact with the Sæculum. — THE DICTIONARY , 4th edition, A.R. 3000
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
"BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS"
“CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING"
Pseudo-profound bullshit statement: "Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"; can the reader distinguish this bullshit paper from a profound paper?
- The unknown flees from the implausible.
- Unheard elephants are never green.
- Although many people seek apples, few seek the road.
- Judgement is like chewing on expensive rubber.
- A circle is a square with intention.
Note that the purple indic text on top is the word "Bullshit" transliterated in Gujarati.
I found the study pretty interesting especially table 2 is extremely informative!
And then there's the question of how 'profound' the second set is to begin with..
Relevant part of the paper
> Numeracy and cognitive reflection (Section 4). Participants responded to three numeracy questions taken from Schwartz et al. [30] and from the Berlin numeracy test ([31]), and immediately thereafter to the three questions that make up the original CRT [12]. On both these variables, participants obtained a score between 0 and 3 representing the number of correct responses.
I would argue that bullshit-i sensitive types are also the ones who fall for Nigerian prince emails, and the paper is there to test that.
Why is the second sentence "profound"? If I were to say it sounds like bullshit to me (it actually kind of does?) what would be the counter-argument, other than "we asked X people and the majority felt it was a profound statement" (equally, a bullshit statement)?
I reckon there is no concrete way to formalise the meaning of "bullshit" and "profundity". One person's bullshit statement can easily bee another's profound wisdom ("turn the other cheek" - bullshit, or profound? "Live and let live" - bullshit, or profound? etc).
So what exactly is the point of trying to predict behaviour from observations about subjective quantities? What exactly is being claimed here? That if I have a strong view about what is bullshit and what is not, I can predict how people will behave?
I cannot give you example for the first sentence (because it is bullshit), but for the second sentence, I can imagine a person who tries a lot of new things and makes a lot of mistakes, presumably because they do not know how to do it. The way the sentence is phrased is just a reversed implication of that.
Note that the "profound" sentence can still be wrong or false or even unfalsifiable statement. The point is that you can assign meaning to it, build a mental model around it.
I think this is a bit like Kolmogorov complexity - just because you can't find a concrete example of a statement, doesn't mean that there isn't one, only that there isn't one that you know of.
It's also very hard to tell whether something is a concrete example of a natural language statement, especially when that statement is metaphorical.
Finally- I'm pretty sure I can think of statements that would map to concrete examples that could be identified as either bullshit or profound truths, depending on who you ask or who is making the statement. For instance, if I say that "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge" - that could easily be applied to mystical knowledge (probably bullshit) and to scientific knowledge (probably not quite bullshit).
For example, I can say "All holomorphic functions are analytic", and the fact that you cannot come up with a concrete example, or even that you don't understand the meaning of the sentence (if you don't know anything about complex analysis) still doesn't mean that it is bullshit.
Metaphors are not a problem; you can also explain them in the above sense.
> "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge"
Different people might interpret "hidden knowledge" differently, that's true. But then I would say that whether or not the statement is objectively bullshit or profound depends on the interpretation of whoever uttered the phrase was using.
So if it was uttered by Deepak Chopra, it is probably bullshit. If it was uttered by Carl Sagan, it is probably profound.
I mean, this problem is not specific to bullshit/profound statements, but to language in general. For example, common objection to evolution is "evolution is just a theory". Here, the word "theory" can take on two different meanings, and the truthfulness of the sentence depends on the meaning that is assigned to the word "theory".
This only poses potential problem for the study, where the statements should be selected so that the confusion due to usual (assumed) meaning of words is minimized.
It seems quite reasonable that if you are able to easily see concrete examples of statements for those (and only those) where others can do so as well, then this would indicate a general alignment with the wider society and also be correlated with prosocial behavior.
In essence, if you're given a subjective, metaphorical task where the "correct answers" aren't entirely logical, then this enables evaluation if your subjectivity and your metaphors are aligned with the social consensus or not. As this task is very easy for some people and not so for others, then this seems informative about some objective property or ability of the test takers, even if "bullshit-sensitivity" IMHO isn't a very accurate name for that property; there are some people for which statement #2 is clearly not bullshit and there are some people for which it's debatable, and without labelling one group as correct or wrong, it illustrates a difference between two different groups of people.
While the second sentence isn't very profound, it does have a meaning and it's used as an example because most people will understand it.
I've heard many different variations of the second sentence, from many different people but, again, popular opinion about what constitutes bullshit or not is not a very objective criterion.
The author probably should have defined "bullshit" more accurately, but the paper seems to be purposely abstruse.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
E.g., you know what an observation is, what "universal" means and what a transformation is - but it's far less clear what an "universal observation" is or what it means if one is transformed.
If this were a programming language, the sentences would produce valid ASTs but would be riddled with type errors.
I think output from markov chains or other generators have the same property: They easily produce valid individual words and correct grammatical structures but they don't care at all that those structures don't have a well-defined higher-level meaning.
Couriously though, we seem to validate a sentence mostly on those lower levels - which has the effect that you might not realize a sentence has no meaning but just have a vague feeling of not understanding it.
The effect also reminds me of some badly-writtem math papers, where an auther uses a familiar notation from one domain and applies it to objects of a different domain without clearly defining what he wants to do. It can take surprisingly long until you even realize you have no idea what it means.
I got from the website:
> Hidden meaning depends on great neural networks
and the paper has
> The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.
The website has
> Your heart belongs to total acceptance of observations
and the paper has
> Your movement transforms universal observations
The website has
> Information transforms mortal knowledge.
which is similar to
> Your movement transforms universal observations
and
> The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.
This one is classified bullshit, although I think it makes at least somewhat sense.
I think he has a point.
Creativity could be proposed to be conditional on maintaining personal well-being (health) while undergoing exposure to many new experiences (tolerance).
Losing your health during exposure to new things makes you reactionary and conservative and want to cling to set ideas.
Have no tolerance and you won't even want to be exposed to new or uncomfortable experiences in the first place.
But if you can maintain your health, and tolerate exposure to new ideas, why the fruit that comes from both those while undergoing continued diverse experiences is presumably creativity (being in the future because you can only get it after said experiences).
Unhealthy people can also be both creative and non-creative, both cling to one set of ideas or change their minds constantly. Pain makes you more nervous, frustrated, snappy etc, but you can still be creative.
Conversely, you can be tolerant and healthy, but still completely non-creative, whether it means generating new ideas or creating things. You can be tolerant, healthy and completely passive.
It's a lot easier to be a content consumer while in poor physical/mental health than to be a content creator.
> 2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.
Describes reading the description of an artwork at a Modern Art gallery pretty well
Lisp has an abstract beauty in that it is a homoiconic language thought up as an intellectual exercise from a small number of basic rules and simple syntax.
The hidden meaning, which surprised even its creator at the time that he wrote "RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE", that a mathematical syntax should also be a fully implementable language to get a working interpreter, transforms the original paper into something even more beautiful and amazing than the original abstract beauty of the idea.
"The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty".
Edit: indeed, i think that one can apply to many instances of people who find programming languages and math aesthetically beautiful but also practical :P
That's the idealistic view. Also LISP was developed over some years, based on earlier languages for list processing (IPL, ...) and similar.
The paper 'RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE' was a presentation to a specific (more scientific) audience, while there were earlier and at the same time already 'real' language manuals published, which were concerned with less 'abstract' topics.
See for example:
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/LISP_P...
Do you feel something if you see a landscape, portrait, or still life? Do you think they are still art? In a similar thread, if you stare at something abstract, if it draws you in to gaze on it because it is a cool design even if it brings forth no feeling, does it make it art or not?
Do you understand hidden meanings from 200 years ago that would have been obvious to viewers at the time? Do you still consider it art even if you have to read about the meanings built into the art?
(Art is full of pretentious bullshit, and I'm of the opinion that assigning meaning or requiring a meaning of art is, of itself, pretentious.)
That is not the same as having a meaning, though. For example, Mandelbrot set makes me feel "it is wonderful", but it doesn't need to have any meaning (technically, it is a solution to some equation, so it has meaning, but you don't have to know the meaning in order to feel that something).
Art is tricksome. It is what it is justified as being, but it's also just what it is.
I've found it easier over the years to just say that I like / dislike something, but my opinion isn't worth anything, and can happily be different to yours.
I guess I know it when I see it.
Show white noise to an Imagenet CNN and it will give you a score for something.
Feynman famously used this technique to understand and quickly find flaws in complex mathematical theories - he followed a specific example along.
Anyway, back to the article; I am not clear, maybe both seeing through bullshit and being pro-social are correlated to general intelligence?
They correlate because the root cause of identifying them is reading comprehension.
And for people who have a bit of trouble with the comprehension, the pessimistic "this is just bs" way of throwing up one's hands and giving up is correlated with non-social behavior. Meh.
It feels counter-intuitive to find cynicism positively correlated with prosocial behaviour (which the article defines as donating to and/or joining a charity.)
OOP (as the solution to every programming problem), Java everywhere (performance is great and/or doesn't matter - really!!), P2P everything (because Napster), semantic web, XML, SOAP, agile(washing), cloud (whether it makes sense or not), server-side JS (overused), client-side JS whether you need it or not, IoT (aka please pay us monthly), blockchain. You see a lot of bullshit in a career.
So if you go by the abstract the results match your intuition!
Bullshit-receptivity = tendency to perceive bullshit sentences as meaningful
So, BS-S is not BS-R, thus there is no contradiction. Mate, the guys wrote a paper about it, they're not going to have the abstract contradict the title.
Does it? I would expect both to follow from, for want of a better term, "caring more": you would expect someone who is more sensitive to bad things to be both cynical and prosocial than someone who noticed bad things less.
Sensitivity means being more manipulatable, sociopaths manipulate to get what they want which leads to the dupes copying the antisocial behavior without a thought or even the benefits the originator gains. The only beneficial to actor behaviors likely arise from the sociopath's excuses being internalized. Look at snake oil salesmen for an example - pushing antivax lies to sell "essential oils" to get profit and spreading bullshit to cause others to make others sick avoiding imaginary risks.
Meanwhile a skeptic would refuse to go along with wrong just because "everyone is doing it" even if they are selfish for not wanting the needless risk or hassle.
Someone who's never encountered words like elucidate could be dazzled into believing it describes something profound. Whereas people who are familiar with the word would recognize it's use is awkward and meaningless.
I don't think it would be a big leap to theorize that an effective education correlates with prosocial behavior.
1. power vs. persistence
4. things you say and things you do not say
6. our flaws and other's flaws
7. open door and entering (what your teacher does and what you must do)
9. the comparison is implied but trying something new vs never trying something new.
11. again implied but imagined pain versus real pain
14. tempted and resisting vs tempted and falling.
2: a causes b
3: a causes b for c
5: a and b provides c for d
8: a changes b (this one has a very weakly implied comparison, because "universal observations"
changes and is therefore not "universal", but there is no specificity about the difference so it
is not really a comparison, just noting the change.)
etc.
As someone who has experience with both, my bullshit senses are tingling.
Not sure that lines up with your definition.
Second, donation experience did not have a statistically significant relationship with "bullshit sensitivity," which is kind of a bad smell. As for prior plausibility, the authors admit "previous theory and research does not give us strong reasons for predicting a direct relation between reactions to bullshit and prosocial behavior." The study also lacked a control group.
Not surprising. People incapable of differentiating objectivity from self-satisfying statements are less likely predict anything objectively.
Whereas...
> The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.
People who are objective are better able to analyze social contexts.
I further suspect objective people are already aware of this and self-satisfying people are not aware there is any difference.
Also, the so-called "bullshit sensitivity" is undoubtedly related to many other factors like literacy, educational level, income, social status etc. No doubt people who enjoy a higher social status and have more money on their hands instead of having to worry about making ends meet, would find it easier to contribute to "pro-society" activities. I just simply fail to see how this study is much meaningful. (Even the word "prosocial" is just dubious. It's not in the sense of "socializing more" but "contributing more to the society".) Sounds like quite a BS study to me.
I would attempt a correlation with economic means though. I am pretty sure most people are able to see that a spade is a spade but too many would put up with sh*t because in need.
In the abstract, the 'profound' example they give is: "The person who never made a mistake never tried something new".
But this is itself a deeper level of BS. The intended moral of this quotation is "You should try something new", but if you accept that as an axiom, then the act of never-trying-something-new is itself a mistake, and so the sentence contradicts itself.
If Albert Einstein wracked his brain for the most profound statement he could come up with, it would be indistinguishable from bullshit to anyone but a top theoretical physicist.
The article should be titled something more like: "Fortune-cookie sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"
I feel a similar way when I see the same person every day asking for money due to "hard luck.". Is this a professional or a victim? If I give this person money am I hurting myself and/or hurting them?
Difference between these situations? In second case, another human's well-being is at stake. In the first case, I could lose some novel insight.
Both cases carry a cognitive load which I must avoid bearing for the sake of my over-worked brain.
Is there a word for a kind of apathy that does not suggest immorality or lack of empathy?
Perhaps English speaking people who can’t parse those sentences don’t have the free time or cash to give away.
They basically test your ability to correctly parse an English sentence.
Here are some alternatives that might correlate well to lack of BS-sensitivity and attraction to profound-sounding fluff:
- ability to solve quantitative reasoning problems
- ability to use deductive logic
- likelihood to take unnecessary risks for minimal rewards
- likelihood to change one's mind in face of new information
https://www.quora.com/What-are-common-shit-tests-The-term-sh...
"Shit tests" in the most common usage, refer to doing provocative things to throw someone off their stride and see how unflappable they are.
The paper is about sentences that don't really mean anything, but carry some (false) markers of profundity.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/executive-salaries-chariti...
Deriving meaning from what others deem meaningless could be profound in itself?
I see quite a few comments of people looking at the result and trying to come up with explanations for why it might hold. Heck, there even seems to be some confusion with the term "bullshit-receptivity" (and "bullshit-sensitivity"), which means that, even if the paper is valid, you might be drawing the opposite conclusion.
I'd like you to imagine, without going back to check right now, that you are wrong about the result. That they've found the opposite correlation to the one you thought holds. Can you find a reason why it would? Does it seem justifiable, explainable? As much so as your original belief? That should be a warning sign that your explanation might be a bit pre-emptive.
I am glad for the commenters saying they found the result "counter-intuitive". Noticing your confusion in this way is a good skill to learn, especially in this day and age. That nagging feeling in the back of your mind that something is off or that you forgot something.
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As an aside: If you are interested in more on biases, may I suggest reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. One of my favourite non-fiction books. Some of the results in there (notably priming) have themselves unfortunately fallen prey to the replication crisis, but the book as a whole is still brilliant.
Some links RE: the replication crisis and Kahneman's responses regarding it:
The Irony Effect: How the scientist who founded the science of mistakes ended up mistaken. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
Replicability-Index Improving the replicability of empirical research Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
Kahneman's Comment: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
Retraction Watch “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies:” Nobel Prize winner admits mistakes https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...
The bullshit statements were easy to pick out because they're too abstract or require lateral thinking.
Analogously, people who don't get tripped up by bullshit might be better (more convincing) at spouting self-serving bullshit.
Framed that way, I can believe it.
How would you even measure what profound insight is, nevermind determining whether something causes its absence?