
Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound - ageofwant
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153419
======
jkldotio
Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.

"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about
$72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data.
That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above
the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than
the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is
around $61,000 for both"[0]

How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors
don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might
help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely
random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's
much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of
the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service
are not very representative of the population at large.

[0][http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-
trumps-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-
working-class-support/)

[1] [http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-
amaz...](http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amazon-
mechanical-turk-workers/)

~~~
mistermann
Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed:

"Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying
on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the
tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is
avoided [6,7]"

[5] leads to:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003596)
Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive
style and heuristic processing

So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism.

It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-
leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's
righteousness.

------
sfifs
Keeping aside the clearly political nature of the content, this study itself
seems quite poorly designed & amateurish.

A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of
similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still,
the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non-
bullshit" statement pool.

~~~
tommorris
A much better paper came out last year that used tweets from Deepak Chopra and
quotes from a random "new age wisdom" generator.

PDF:
[http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf)

And there's some followups...

Dalton 2016 -
[http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf)

Reply from Pennycook et al. -
[http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf)

~~~
algorias
I had to chuckle at this passage from the first link:

> participants were shown a list of activities (e.g., biking, reading)
> directly below the following instructions: “Below is a list of leisure
> activities. If you are reading this, please choose the “other” box below and
> type in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved rather
> difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing

The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!

~~~
avs733
This issue isn't just with students or compensation. A lot of the quality
issues have more to do with serious questions of reading comprehension and the
over use of (poorly designed) survey methodologies. It ends up being a lot
like the 'democracy' complaints...its not a great method but it is better than
all the others for what it does. Not only are 'attention check questions'
common, there is some interesting research on their effectiveness.

Eventually, I suspect/hope that NLP and neural networks will enable more
authentic data collection across many spectrums.

------
blowski
Where do favourable views of Taylor Swift or Ayn Rand sit on this scale?
Despite being a bit of a lefty, I can't help but think this article is itself
bullshit.

~~~
samirillian
There has to be a joke in there somewhere, right? Maybe the article is itself
a test!

~~~
danielweber
"Are you susceptible to bullshit if it agrees with your priors?"

------
tomp
If I can tell correctly, these statements were used as examples of bullshit
(from [1]):

1\. _Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty._

2\. _Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity._

3\. _Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena._

4\. _The future explains irrational facts._

5\. _Imagination is inside exponential space time events._

6\. _We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align
us with the nexus itself._

7\. _Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means
an unveiling of the unrestricted._

8\. _Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us._

9\. _We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness
that will give us access to the quantum soup itself._

10\. _Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy._

(I definitely fall prey to 4.)

Some additional commentary (from [2]):

> _Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially
> profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together
> randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit
> statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following,
> which is not bullshit:

> “Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract”._

I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians,
anarchists, ...) fall prey to.

[1]
[http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf)

[2]
[http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf)

~~~
logicallee
These are not all bullshit statements. My summary at bottom.

Here are my ratings where 0 = nonsense, 10 = profound statement.

1\. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.

I rate this an 8/10 and read it as an excerpt from a review of a piece by an
abstract painter. It says two things: firstly (though this comes at the end),
that in purely aesthetic terms the beauty of the piece is unparalleled. I'd
like to see it! But secondly, that the reviewer knows some hidden meaning that
transforms this beauty in some way. Presumably I could be told what that
hidden meaning is if I read the full review. I definitely want to see the
painting! The construction of the sentence is also highly satisfying.

2\. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.

This is an 7/10, but only because it is not such a deep observation. It says
something very specific. It says that if you are creative, but only in a
subtle way, then if you enjoy good health you are more likely to follow
through on your subtle visions. So if you're in a slightly, but not very,
creative profession such as technical writer or you are a food scientist for
Nabisco, then if you improve your health you are more likely to be in "top
form" and have the energy to actually make something you're thinking about a
reality. I don't personally agree with this statement, and it does not seem to
be very deep. Other things that would top "good health" as a way to impart
reality to subtle creativity include: financial independence; a supporting
partner; free time; a sponsor; drugs. The sentence is certainly meaningful
however.

3\. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.

This is meaningless to me, as "infinite phenomena" is on its face a
meaningless descriptor, it just doesn't apply to anything, and even if it did,
the idea of quieting them is meaningless, and even if quieting them meant
something, wholeness doesn't mean anything to me. 0/10: the same as a markov
chain writing.

4\. The future explains irrational facts. 12/10 for profundity and statement.

Luke 8:17: "For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither
any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad."

The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made
manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational-
seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply
profound statement.

I'd also like to point out that Isaiah 40:4 and Isaiah 40:5 state: "Every
valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground
shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will
be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the LORD
has spoken." says roughly the same thing. But what does the bit about valleys
being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or
it's literal but weird, or it's just random nonsense. Our #4 is much, much
more profound.

Plus, it's very easy to see how it applies directly to weird actions by
someone that can later be revealed not to be weird at all. This can apply to
companies, to Tesla, to SpaceX, whatever. It's a deep statement.

5\. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 0/10\. Markov chain
output. "Space time events" simply doesn't refer to anything.

6\. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us
with the nexus itself.

This is hard to judge. I will give it 1/10 but want to click through for the
context to see what the author might mean by "the nexus" such that it can be
something you can align with. On its face it seems kind of ridiculous to align
yourself with a nexus. A "self-aware blossoming of being" is, at best, an
absolutely ham-fisted way to phrase anything. This is a terrible sentence
without some kind of context.

7\. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means
an unveiling of the unrestricted.

I can't judge "frequencies of quantum energy" but in the sense that
consciousness is a sum of what the atoms in your head are doing, and atoms
consist of quantum states, the first part would be 8/10 to me if that were a
real phrase. I couldn't see "Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum
energy" appearing in real journal article entitled "Do quantum effects matter
in brain neural activity? The possibility of a deterministic emulation of
thinking agents." The second sentence is markov chain stuff that is obviously
wrong, it's 0/10\. The first half, due to the phrasing, is like 2/10\. Overall
it's 3/10 as an average of the profundity of the first sentence if it used a
real phrase, deductions for using a fake phrase (frequencies of quantum
energy), and a meaningless second sentence.

8\. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.

In a context where some author attempted to argue that you should increase
your "mindfulness", I can see some author using consciousness instead of
mindfulness or presence. As such in an argument that more and more things make
sense as you increase your mindfulness, it makes sense to me that such an
author would argue that mindfulness, or in their phrasing consciousness, leads
to growth in the number of things that are coherent or make sense around us,
and lead to growth as a person. Note that this use of "consciousness" is real:
"the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings." So I'll
give this a 9/10.

9\. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness
that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.

0/10\. None of the terms have any possible meaning.

10\. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.

Even if this were a statement about only endorphin production in nature,
plants don't experience this. Plants don't have "joy". If it were about
animals it might make some kind of sense (though probably still wrong), but as
it is this is a nonsense statement that is a 0/10.

\----

    
    
        Score:
    
        8/10 
        7/10
        0/10
        12/10
        0/10
        1/10
        3/10
        9/10
        0/10
        0/10
    
        Average score:
        --------------
        4/10
    

So, I've seen worse.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
It's funny how you quote the bible as if it had any authority on profundity,
given that it is full of equally vacuous bullshit, including the verses you
quote.

It seems to me like that demonstrates (a) how real the effect is that this
study measured, and (b) what the basic mechanism is that makes it happen:
Religious people tend to start with statements that they have decided they
want to believe without any actual reason and then they go out and try to find
reasons, no matter how metaphorical or analogous these reasons might be, and
thus no matter how much these reasons actually logically and empirically
support the statement at hand. Scientifically minded people on the other hand
tend to reject statements until they have evidence that supports them, so they
aren't invested into finding reasons to believe, because they care more about
what is actually true.

That's also why religions consistently fail at discovering true facts about
the world (or in other words: why they fail at rejecting bullshit), while
science yields all the progress we make in understanding the world (which in
particular means rejecting all the bullshit).

~~~
logicallee
It's funny how you can say someone "quotes the bible as if it had any
authority on profundity" after that person wrote "But what does the bit about
valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of
metaphor, or it's literal but weird, _or it 's just random nonsense_."

The study was about bullshit meaning literal, meaningless nonsense statements,
like "Imagination is inside exponential space time events." If you can't tell
the difference between meaningless statements and ones that are simply wrong
you are no better than the editors who accepted this hoax paper:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

You completely misread my comment.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Well, I would say that you didn't make yourself particularly clear, then :-)

Yes, you did list the possibility that that quote might just be random
nonsense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that is what you think is the
case. In particular given that you also wrote this:

> The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made
> manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however
> irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This
> is a deeply profound statement.

I don't see how there is anything profound about this. It's just a baseless
assertion, as far as I can tell. So, while it's a step beyond just random
gibberish, in that there is some semantic meaning to this, it's still just a
deepity (
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity)
).

~~~
logicallee
I'm sorry, I must have let the fact that the document I chose as a basis for
comparison (and which I don't believe) influences the lives of 2.2 billion
people every day and has for hundreds of years cloud me into thinking that it
is more "profound" \- as a basis of comparison - than if a pack of peanuts
says "may contain peanuts" on it. /s

In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the
article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is
irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the
> article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is
> irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)

I think you are using an unusual definition of "profound", then?

To quote the relevant definition from the oxford dictionary:

"(Of a person or statement) having or showing great knowledge or insight"

I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false
insight"?

Now, there is a "feeling of profundity", which indeed does not depend on
truth, but which can be evoked by, for example, statements that (to a
particular person) _seem_ profound, but actually aren't, but also just by
certain experiences.

~~~
logicallee
>I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false
insight"?

sure it would be met. your usage is obviously not what anybody means by
profound. your usage suggests someone can say "I just read a really
speculative physics paper which might be really profound, if it's true.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to test it today, so it's
impossible to know whether it's profound or not. But it would certainly be
interesting if it turned out to be profound!"

Go ahead and find a _single_ person online talking in such terms about whether
a journal article in a hard science is profound or not, where if it turns out
to be true it's profound but if it turns out to be false it's not profound.
Profound is a common word. Find a single person using it in science the way
you suggest I use it.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Well, I see your point, but I think that's actually more a matter of how
exactly you define "truth" and of colloquial use of language.

If a paper has obvious errors in it that make it highly questionable whether
any of the results are reliable, then you wouldn't call that profound, would
you? I mean, it must be at the very least plausible that it's true after some
critical reading. And I'd even go further: For example, a paper can be
profound because of a new perspective, even if the specific results are
actually wrong. But the reason that it is still considered profound is because
the new perspective still "has truth to it", in the sense that it matches
reality well enough to be a useful tool for generating future results.

From someone who doesn't have sufficient knowledge to judge the reliability of
some result, I would indeed expect them to say something along the lines "this
might be profound".

Also, if a paper that at some point is considered profound turns out to be
completely untrue and useless, people would probably stop refering to it as
profound?

Which is all in contrast to some "feeling of profundity", which really might
be a purely emotional matter.

------
mseebach
> Participants (N = 196; obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk)

That's bound to be a representative sample.

~~~
tinco
Why would it not be?

~~~
78666cdc
It's clearly not a random sample of the population.

~~~
tinco
For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do
you need a very large sample. It's got to do with the fact that our brains
largely function the same. Your sample has to be large and random enough to be
fairly confident that you didn't accidentally pick a significant amount of
people with some sort of mental divergence (i.e. very low IQ, very high IQ,
autism, psychopathy, etc..) that could be relevant.

I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk
that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon
Turk.

Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population
bias we think the paper might have:

People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas
when they also are susceptible to bullshit.

What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of
conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is
the measured correlation?

edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master
thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I
posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were
surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining
correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was
sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share.
Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm
not a psych student.

~~~
dlss
The view you're espousing is wrong. When you actually test if what you're
calling human universals actually are universal, you generally find they're
not:

 _" Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples
from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. This
review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results
emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in
fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers.
The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization,
spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self-concepts. This review (1)
indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin
slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will
require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address
these challenges."_

(The thin slice of humanity referred to above is westernized college students.
Perhaps mechanical turkers do not suffer from this bias? seems unlikely
though)

[http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Weird_People_BBS_H...](http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Weird_People_BBS_Henrichetal.pdf)

also see
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology-
studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07/) and
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/weird_psychology_social_science_researchers_rely_too_much_on_western_college.html)
for pop write-ups.

~~~
tinco
Thanks! That's interesting, seems I might have had it wrong. I should've
brought that up during my friends master thesis presentation, maybe he
wouldn't have got his diploma ;) Are psychology researchers in general aware
of this review? Obviously my friends master thesis was just a small
inconsequential study, but if the universals that are now commonly used have
turned out to not actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of
researchers have to retract/redo their research?

~~~
archgoon
> but if the universals that are now commonly used have turned out to not
> actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of researchers have to
> retract/redo their research?

Reproducibility is a major concern. Many experiments are poorly designed.

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716)

So, yes, about 60% of research needs to be redone.

------
reednj
"why people who are less educated than me are too stupid to vote for who I
tell them too"

~~~
blowski
"I'm a reasonable and intelligent person. I believe x. If you don't believe x,
you're either stupid or unreasonable."

~~~
Atwood
"Now that I have polarized you into my foil -insert Inigo Montoya quote-"

------
JulianMorrison
This needs to be very careful to avoid the mistake of taking "a sentence
disagrees with science" as equivalent to "a sentence is pseudo profound
bullshit" or you will get results that simply divide people into belief clades
some of which are scientific and some of which are not.

An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the
accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in
disagreement with science and _a true statement_ in the belief system of
western occult magic.

Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and
label the whole of "not" as bullshit.

~~~
NoGravitas
Can you recommend a good daily routine of banishing? My cubicle seems to be
accumulating low-level negative entities.

~~~
JulianMorrison
The LBRP is reputed to be good.

------
logicallee
As an outsider, I found the technical term the profession chose (according to
the study, I don't know that branch of study myself), to be profoundly
distracting. The profession made a really bad choice by choosing to go with
it.

It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual
attractiveness called it "fuckability ". The profession should have called it
"nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.

~~~
_delirium
It's annoyed me periodically as well, in part because it's a bit of a stretch
to call it a "technical term" (its precise definition is quite slippery
between authors), and in part because to the extent there _is_ well-defined
content, it's mostly just PR trying to oversell more narrow results, which
would be better called by some more accurate term.

Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly
just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of
his book _On Bullshit_. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and
gets old if you keep repeating it.

------
nanis
> we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not
> representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample
> of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for
> an online survey.

I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals.

There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology.
In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In
this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how
well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements.

When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend
to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid.

My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take
the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After
all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of
baggage which this study does nothing to control.

------
guscost
This is a classic psychology journal ad-hominem:

[https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-
hom...](https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hominem/)

------
dkopi
"We obtained complete data from 196 US-American individuals who participated
in an online study via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where researchers can
post jobs (such as responding to a questionnaire) which can be completed by
users of Amazon Mechanical Turk Only demographic information about sex, age,
and in what country participants live was collected"

I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew
these results significantly.

------
zerotimer
I haven't read the full article yet but this reminds me of a study last year
"On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" which was
published in the journal Judgment & Decision Making and was a fun read[1].

I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny:

> Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the
> rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more
> bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for
> statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly
> correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak
> Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra
> has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty
> New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3
> Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or
> ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political
> rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated
> by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in
> to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is
> that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes
> his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject
> other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own
> bullshit. The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an
> important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying
> cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is
> detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively
> wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step
> toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit.

[1][http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html](http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html)

------
runn1ng
I can already see how there will be a meaningful and useful debate here.
Politically charged articles are always like that.

------
Lxr
This is funny and all but I fear their accepting articles like this damages
the cause for PLoS long term. OA journals already have enough trouble with
reputation and prestige, which is the main reason Elsevier et al are still in
business, and articles like this (and there are too many examples IMO) don't
really help.

------
siegecraft
I wonder what misperceiving the bullshit that is this study as profound says
about someone.

~~~
billhendricksjr
That's precisely what makes this article brilliant on multiple levels. I'm a
hard core lefty who thinks the Dems are too conservative and I'm laughing with
the paper and at myself.

------
xmlblog
"It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact
on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically.
_We invite individuals to start with the present contribution._ "

(emphasis mine)

------
thaw13579
It's not discussed in the paper, but another important point is line between
lies and bullshit, and the reality distorting effects of BS:

"For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the
authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no
attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of
truth than lies are."

[https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-
liar](https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar)

~~~
humanrebar
I just commented elsewhere, but the Trump University suits are fraud suits.
They're exactly about bullshit _and_ lying.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University)

~~~
thaw13579
Didn't mean to imply that bullshit excludes lying, just that bullshit instead
erodes the concept of truth in people's minds. Thankfully there are laws and
records that are less easily eroded...

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ghufran_syed
Alternative hypotheses regarding the 'misperceiving [random] statements as
profound ' group: maybe the group is: 1) more polite? 2) more efficient? (less
time wasted on the task - more money per unit time) 3) more fond of poetry? 4)
more religious? I think this last would be an interesting hypothesis to test,
but like the authors, I have _NO_ evidence that would support any of these
hypotheses. However, unlike the authors, it appears I recognize that there is
a lack of evidence :)

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raverbashing
Funnily, the correlation is higher for Cruz than Trump, also the correlation
of mundane statements with profoundness is higher for Clinton (higher than the
corr. of BS with Trump)

~~~
pavlov
Trump's campaign personality is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to
be a major component of his appeal. The things he says are often stupid,
dangerous or wrong, but they're not bullshit in the sense of the OP's study.

"We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and
therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong
resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve
the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about
the same topic.

~~~
mac01021
Doesn't the latter actually mean something? I agree the structure of the
sentence is a bit tortured, but it clearly means that someone should advocate
vehemently for the two governments to set up a meeting to discuss how to help
out people living on the border.

~~~
pavlov
The latter sentence was the first empty thing that came to my mind, so any
meaning is accidental. Even though it superficially means something, there's
no "who, what, how" in that sentence: who should advocate for the dialogue,
what that dialogue should consist of, or how it would help the people.

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return0
It's very bad for PLoS to use these clickbaity titles.

~~~
JasonSage
What title would you use instead?

~~~
return0
"Mechanical Turk users who favor conservatives are more receptive to high-BSR
statements."

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randogp
Apparently, in the article's comment section the word "bullshit" triggers a
profanity filter.

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F01a8325f-089b-434b-badd-7d9b99dadfd0)

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mjpuser
Jason Silva is bullshit.

The League on love
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s)

Jason silva on love
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA)

~~~
alva
My life is slightly worse having watched those videos

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dspeyer
They don't mention Researcher Allegiance Effect. Therefore I suspect they did
nothing about it. Given the nature of the study, I feel comfortable ignoring
the results on that alone, without bothering to find specific methodological
flaws.

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squozzer
I found almost as laughable the statement that Ds were susceptible to
mistaking mundane statements as profound.

D: 2+2=4. Wow man! R: 2+2=5. That's what happens when you cut taxes for job
creators!

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mikehall314
The original source for the pseudo-profound bullshit seems to be
[http://wisdomofchopra.com/](http://wisdomofchopra.com/)

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massysett
I now know to ignore anything from plos.org, thanks.

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hellofunk
It's also true that oftentimes ideas that are truly profound are instead
perceived as bullshit.

~~~
DonHopkins
But it's extremely rare for a presidential candidate to ever make a truly
profound statement.

One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the-
fact explanation of it that he gave later [2].

"I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And
then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off
to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo."

[1] Mike Gravel - Rock:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8)

[2] Mike Gravel Explains The Rock Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY)

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newesthn
This is a correlation study on Bullshit.

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newesthn
This is a correlation Bullshit study.

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shiftoutbox
This is deep

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eggman
perspective is crucial; this conflict will continue

