On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

I feel like this is a strong contender for the 2023 Ig Nobel prize in psychology

They have banger entries for psychology

> Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule, for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows

>Fritz Strack, for discovering that holding a pen in one's mouth makes one smile, which makes one happier—and for then discovering that it does not.

> Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.

It’s worth teaching your kids how to hear rhetoric and mentally rephrase it as a simple logical assertion. This ability helps you cut through the BS— quickly discerning whether a statement is nonsense (as in the study) or illogical (as in so many political arguments), or substantive.

When I saw the 2023 date, I was very confused, as I could have sworn I read this years ago.

But yes...the original publication date was 2015, as noted in the "Information" section as well as the copyright. Looks like when Cambridge University Press took over publication of the journal, they pushed everything on Jan. 1, 2023, so all the articles have that "publication date".

The authors give the phrase “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” as a canonical example of bullshit. Well, that’s a terrible choice, because the statement is, classically, incredibly profound.

In the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition [1], harmony results from the limiting of the unlimited. Or, paraphrasing, “wholeness results from the quieting of the infinite.” Harmony~wholeness, unlimited~infinite, quieting~limiting.

“The mixture of elements from the Limited and Unlimited, in appropriate combination, produces a harmonious mathematical concord” [2]

Nobody claims that this statement is easy to understand. But do you really want to call bullshit on Plato and Pythagoras? That’s bold.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philolaus/ [2] https://research.tees.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/4035550/60...

At the risk that this entire paper is pseudo-profound bullshit that is duping me, it strikes me that what they found is accurate.

> Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.

I was a little wary since I saw the research using mechanical turk, but thankfully it also indicated how some of the more obvious issues specific to it were addressed.

On the whole, I found one thing rather interesting. The study suggested that being too receptive is closely related to gullibility.

On reading the Abstract my first thought was 'Oh, Deepak must feature in here'. Not at all disappointed. They even cite http://wisdomofchopra.com/ - which is probably an inductive proof in itself. I've recently been reviewing some of Sam Harris' confrontations with Deepak on youtube, and I can really feel whence the authors of this paper are summoning their frustration.

Unpopular opinion (as revered in tech space): but this is the vibe I always had about Raval Navikant / Naval Ravikant. sorry. Can someone help me understand why I'm missing something about that folk?

This is basically a blueprint for political speechwriters to utilize.

It may unfortunately not be the antidote that was envisioned.

In the age of ChatGTP it’s going to be a useful skill to detect and not receive bullshit.

One of the simple ways to detect it is just to notice the warm glow such things give you, and become suspicious of it.

In general, a statement has information to the extent that it can exclude some things, preferably quite a lot of things. Truth is exponentially exclusive versus false statements, e.g., there's an exponential number of ways of combining letters and spaces but my legal name is only and exactly one of them.

Take the statement "We're all connected." In the absence of a specific definition of connected, that may feel warm and fuzzy, but it's also vacuous. It excludes nothing. There is no practically-meaningful opposing statement "we're all disconnected from each other in every possible meaning of 'disconnected'." Clearly if nothing else we are all gravitationally coupled to each other... and I don't mean that as a joke at all, but to highlight just how vacuous these statements can be.

By contrast consider "We're all presently able to telepathically communicate with every other person in the world." This nails down a very specific claim... specific enough to be false.

A key indicator of this sort of contentless statement is when people aggressively refuse to define their terms because they just want to bask in the warm glow of the statement.

That is a relatively external and objective read on such statements. It is true that as you age and learn about the world and ponder these statements, many such statements may take on new dimensions and new depth. To my mind, this is a process of acquiring a deeper definition of various terms, and typically, these can not be communicated through normal human language. Some people see this as a very profound statement; I see it rather as a contingent statement on the basis of the nature of human language. I can infuse "We're all connected" with some relatively profound meaning of my own, where I see the connections as metaphorically more like how an ecosystem is all connected together. (Actually, I can infuse it with multiple distinct true meanings, which itself is part of the reason the 3 words on their own aren't really that interesting.) I can't really convey the idea I have in my head to you right now, because English is not adequate to convey it. But I think another hypothetical language could do it, it's just not clear what it would be. It is difficult for human language to transcend the statistical average of the ability of its speakers to think precisely, which is one of the primary reasons we end up with so many jargons as subcommunities find they need more precision in certain areas.

(I am perhaps biased by the fact that my day job is literally to convey certain concepts in precision far beyond what English can do, as are most of us here. Between "A user should be able to change their password" and the substantial code involved to actually do that safely and correctly is a great deal of precision, not generally expressible in English. However, sadly, even Rust is not truly capable of expressing what I meant by "We're all connected" in the previous paragraph, even if it is capable of ensuring that any such expression would be memory-safe, which, as is widely acknowledged in philosophical circles, is a very important element of any philosophical opinion.)

A consequence of all of this is that there is a lot of statements that I would agree I can infuse with interesting and deep meanings, but the statements don't necessarily contain that information themselves. In the case of my sample statement, as I mentioned my most natural infusion of meaning into "We're all connected" resembles an ecosystem. Someone else may see it as a statement of universal brotherhood which in their internal definition has an almost direct implication that we should all be nicer to each other because when we hurt each other we are also hurting ourselves. (And even that English statement has multiple deeper interpretations; there's clearly a very mystical meaning many might use, but then there's also the observation that simply putting more bad stuff out into the world increases the odds of me getting bad stuff myself. A direct example is that me slugging you rather sharply increases the chances that I will get slugged myself in the short term. And note there's no particular contradiction between these two expansions.)

This makes a huge variety of mistakes easy. I can look at a situation, nod sagely and say "We're all connected", and you can agree, but it turns out we mean extremely different things. We can even both be profoundly correct in some manner. Harshly, but from what I can see quite fairly, it is very easy for people to pick up some slogan like "We're all connected", see that other people they look up to seem to think it contains some wisdom, and simply fake a reaction to it to conform to a perceived crowd and its leaders. And from my own experience I can say as well that you may have a relatively interesting understanding of it and think you get it, only to get it even more deeply in the future with further refined definitions and understanding.

Maybe I'm taking this too seriously, but the authors seem preoccupied with airing their own frustration with the views of Deepak Chopra. Using such an author as a data source is distracting because he writes about a sort of spiritual thinking that - based on the tone of the article - the authors presumably do not practice themselves.

I would be interested to expand the author's definition of bullshit to account for instances where the 'bullshitee' has insufficient knowledge about a topic. In the same way a true statement about theoretical physics would be indistinguishable from bullshit to anyone not trained in the subject.

I found this paper close to touching on a method for understanding truthiness in generated text, but falling short into comedy.