A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions).
*
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.
I administered the self test and as I was checking my results I started patting myself on the back for doing so well, then I realized this is no different from giving yourself an online IQ test; I just wanted to affirm to myself how smart I think I am.
Also its a bit of a misrepresentation of how the questions were framed as they weren't asked to evaluate if answers were bullshit but rather if they were profound or not. We're going in with the preset mind frame sussing out the bullshit answers as opposed to the more open-ended testing scenario.
Framing of questions always affects the outcome of answers.
>11. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.
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.
Based on the other comments further down, you seem to be caught up on whether the statement is technically true for specific definitions of pain, rather than the underlying point of the statement.
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.
I agree with the "underlying point", but it simply isn't what the sentence says. If you're willing to put that much effort into interpreting it, practically any statement could qualify as profound.
You've already put far more effort into debating that everyone else's interpretation isn't "simply what the sentence says," when their (and my) interpretation tend to hover around the same approximate meaning.
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.
>If you're going by effort, it seems that your interpretation is anything but simpler or lower effort.
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.
I participated in various research experiments at the local university (to earn a bit of money on the side while in high school). The ones that paid the most where usually pain experiments, so I've been through quite a few of those.
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 :)
I don't see how that's relevant. That's a situation where you were comparing various real pains to each other in terms of their intensity. You weren't comparing them to imaginary pains.
Sure it's a bit of a tangent, but related in the sense that I was hurt more, or less, based on my ability to imagine pain (which in my experience was easier after experiencing it).
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).
>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").
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".
> Right, but imagining being tortured doesn't hurt just as much as being tortured. That is why the sentence strikes me as obviously false.
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 ;)
>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".
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.
There's a definition of bullshit given in the paper. It does not relate to whether the statement is true or false (indeed quite the converse, it relating to an absence of concern with truth) and it does relate to whether the statement consistently has an unambiguous meaning.
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.
I said that I'm ok with calling it "not bullshit", so I'm not sure what you're getting at. I was questioning whether or not it could properly be called profound.
On the contrary, you've spent almost every post in this sub-thread questioning whether it is true.
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.
Profundity is best understood as the quality of leading to a better understanding of situations. The profound statement itself doesn't have to be 100% literally true. "All models are wrong; some models are useful."
#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.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, there will be nothing, only I will remain.”
Imagine you are paranoid and you suspect someone is deceiving you. The reality of whether or not they are actually deceiving you does not have an impact on how much pain you feel.
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.
As malloryerik said in another comment, that seems to be confusing the cause of the pain with the pain itself. The paranoiac's pain is real, even if the cause is imaginary.
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.
Or, equally, pain that you might think is real is actually imaginary. (If the two terms are equivalent, substitution should work in either direction.) Seems obviously false to me.
> No, the sentence talks about imaginary pain, not real pain with imaginary causes.
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.
Imaginary pain is pain in your imagination, just like an imaginary car is a car in your imagination. If you stub your toe, you are really in pain and not just imagining it. If you imagine stubbing your toe, you are only in imaginary pain (assuming that you imagine it to be painful).
I didn't downvote any of your comments, but I didn't understand your gripe until this post, and I agree with you that the question is not worded well. Imaginary's primary definition is only existing in your imagination, so it's technically correct on one level, but if you look at synonyms for imaginary, and the way that people commonly use it, you get words like nonexistent, made-up, fictional, unreal, etc..
I think the disconnect here is on what imaginary means in this sentence.
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.
>Whereas you in essence think that [imaginary pain] is an oxymoron
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).
Sorry, I could have been more clear, and kthejoker explained it better (I think). If you use the primary definition, the question makes sense. If you use definitions like 'nonexistent,' the question doesn't make sense. The question basically asks you to infer that it means only existing in your imagination. It's too ambiguous for my taste - for no good reason.
My wife and I have very different pain thresholds. A few days ago, I was stung by a bee. I told my wife about it after a while, and she was shocked, asking if I wanted a pain killer, but to me it was just a curiosity. To her, a bee sting is a relatively major source of discomfort.
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.
That has nothing to do with comparing imagined pain to real pain. You and your wife experience different degrees of real pain in the event of a bee sting. Imaginary pain doesn't come into it.
>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.
I don't think so. The sentence seems to be accepting the distinction between imagined pain and real pain, and saying that the imaginary nature of the former does not cause it to hurt less than the latter (technically leaving open the possibility that it does hurt less for some other reason).
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.
We're just talking about cases where people suffer pain because of false beliefs, which can easily happen to people who have no mental health issues. If you heard that a loved one died, you'd be in a lot of pain, regardless of whether or not that report was true (so long as you believed it).
1) It doesn't make sense to call that "imaginary pain". The pain is real -- that's why it's a problem.
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.
The question isn’t whether the statements are true or false, it’s between “bullshit” and “not bullshit” - not bullshit being something like “maybe has an element of truth or is a reasonable position to take”
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”
it seems that the point isn’t whether the “profound” sentences are true, nor whether you agree with them.
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.
I love this comment thread so much! In challenging whether the statement is profound, you've triggered a lively and thoughtful debate on whether or not it is actually profound, and in doing so proved it to be profound (at least to the HN readership) :)
ITT: People who maybe got one or two wrong, but really really don't want to have been wrong.
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.
This is a terrible research. Even the BS meter they used is not very cited elsewhere.
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)
> 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.
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.
Yeah, that comment is more indicting of the poster than the sentence. I would guess they're not super prosocial.. as a Rorschach test, this thing is fascinating.
It seems to me that the officially "bullshit" sentences are basically meaningless, rather than false. You can disagree about statements about how rivers wear things away; you can't really disagree with the bullshit sentences because they don't actually mean anything.
You’re right, though I think there’s a lean in interpretation toward untrue. I felt my bullshit platitude detector go off a few times on the “normal” sentences, but the wacky sentences made it easy to know that wasn’t what was meant by bullshit.
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
> 8. Your movement transforms universal observations.
I interpreted this one as referencing doppler shift of light emitted by celestial objects due to relative motion, but apparently I was overthinking this.
Observations are inherently a posteriori, not a priori, this is true. However, "universal observation" is not the same as "objective" or "a priori". I'd call the experience of suffering a type of universal observation, but it's not an a priori statement, and it's certainly not objectively evaluable.
That said, the phrase remains mostly meaningless without more context; I'm certainly not trying to defend the phrase itself.
The only context I've heard is "talking about someone / doing something behind their back." Yeah I suppose you can construct more meanings for it, as OP authors apparently wanted to do. And down the BS rabbit hole we go.
>1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence.
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.
A bloody-minded willingness to argue over meaningless technical minutiae is one of the mighty fences separating engineering from philosophy. It subtly undermines the supposedly profound statements by pointing out that there's still a little bit of bullshit in them, too.
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.
Which makes sense, as this is essentially a Rorschach test about prosocial behavior.
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.
I don't think it's fair to criticize metaphor as bullshit insofar as the definition of bullshit is something like "saying things without regard for their truth values" (paraphrasing Harry Frankfurt) because metaphor doesn't have the sort of truth requirement you seem to think it does.
> It subtly undermines the supposedly profound statements by pointing out that there's still a little bit of bullshit in them, too
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.
That specific example seems more like some combination of persistence and power is required: great power suddenly and temporarily expressed could cut through stone while a weak power expressed over a long-enough time frame would have the same effect. On it's face it's only a partially true statement and thus is effectively 'BS' when presented as an aphorism.
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.
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*.
This essay is incredibly ironic. Thousands of words to sneer at "fatally bad thought," based on nothing but bald assertions that it's flawed, pretence that we dear readers all agree and can see that it's flawed, and appeals to emotion via expressions of Stove's disgust at the intellectual corruption its flaws reflect.
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.
> 11. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.
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.
The study doesn't make any claims about the validity of the "actually" profound statements, because the validity or lack thereof is irrelevant to the study. Those statements simply have actual semantic content, as opposed to the meaningless bullshit statements, which don't communicate anything and therefore can't even be assessed for their validity.
Right, but if you ask people whether a sentence is 'profound' or 'bullshit', then it's pretty unclear which of those two categories you should put a sentence in if it makes sense but is also clearly false. Such a sentence doesn't really fall into either category. "The moon is made of cheese" has semantic content, but it's not very profound.
Pain hurts by definition. Even if the pain is imagined, it still hurts, by definition. If you are imagining something that doesn't hurt, you are not imagining pain, by definition. Pain hurts, even if it is all in your head.
Same as 'irrational fears are scary despite being irrational', or 'imaginary fears are scary despite being imaginary'.
Pain is always all in your head. I'm saying that experienced pain is never imagined: it is a real, physical event in the brain, experienced through the mind, a presumably measurable mental phenomenon with physiological, neurochemical aspects. It is the effect of some cause, and that cause could be imagined and it could cause real pain, but if you experience pain, that pain is by definition not imaginary, though the cause may be.
We can imagine other people's pain, however, or hypothetical pain, and that is not the same as experiencing pain itself.
Yes you can. In fact, considering happiness is a feeling, it’s a reasonable question whether there is even a difference between feeling happy and “being” happy.
The difference is maybe analogous to laughing uncontrollably and imagining yourself laughing uncontrollably. Imagining yourself laughing uncontrollably can lead you to feel more ready to laugh, but it is not the same.
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...
Imagining yourself feeling happy can lead to you really feeling happy, but imagined happiness is not the same as experienced happiness. You imagine being happy, and _then_ might put you in the right state of mind for actually experiencing happiness. Let's remember that also the mind is either a physical phenomenon or else it is a spiritual, supernatural one. I go for physical.
Indeed. Thinking happy thoughts can make us feel happy. All experience is colored by records of past experience. So bad shit reminds us of similar bad shit, in the past. And so the bad thoughts and feelings become self-reinforcing. By interrupting that, we can make ourselves happy. Or at least, stoically happy.
I was tempted to call bullshit on that too. But a lot depends on the sort of pain at issue. If it's emotional pain, sure. But I can't imagine the imagined pain of boiling water hurting in any sense as much as reality.
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.
> 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.
Vague and awkward wording is a signature of bullshit artists like Deepak Chopra. They word it that way on purpose, for exactly the reason that it worked on you: people will struggle to find meaning in it until they find an interpretation that works for them, and then they'll feel like their interpretation offers them some kind of insight.
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.
I gave it a 6/10 bullshit rating on my own scale. I agree that metaphors in proverbs are never as vague, so yeah, it's bullshit. It might pass as a poorly translated proverb in a Chinese fortune cookie.
You did better at an interpretation than I did as a native English speaker. I just parsed it as a string of unrelated words.
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.
Awkwardness, vagueness can equal bullshit because it is a blank slate you project your own meaning over.
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?
That's why I described it as "awkward". It could even be poetic, an ellipsis of "irrational facts [that people believe in]", or an elliptical reversal of "facts [that people] irrational[ly believe in]".
I can set up positive or negative cases for each of these. I call bullshit. There are plenty of bullshit "profound" statements that abound in everyday culture ("Look before you leap" vs. "He who hesitates is lost".... which one is right? It depends!).
Well for the non-BS ones, and even the ones you mentioned, they can at least be assigned a truth value. They take A point of view, leaving aside the question of whether that view is right/wrong - like a falsifiable theory. in real life, it will likely apply to some situations but not others.
The BS ones on the other hand are totally meaningless (to me , atleast) like -
"The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty."
Interestingly, that was the only one I categorized differently from the authors—I could find a meaning for it. It's not an aphorism in the same way as the others (I'm not clear on whether that was the point, or just whether the statement had to be meaningful in general)—but it could be interpreted as follows:
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.
In another interpretation, something can be "superficially" beautiful in an abstract way (say, a fractal or abstract mosaic), but if you can find another meaning in it, it changes the way you see it, probably for the better.
"The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty."
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.
Yea, I read "Genuinely profound" and flinched a but too. I read it here to mean even basically coherent ideas. Compared to the "bullshit" ones I think they still stood out 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.
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.
I feel like this is some meta-level test for the reader.
Pseudo-profound bullshit statement: "Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"; can the reader distinguish this bullshit paper from a profound paper?
Disagreed. Both key terms are fully operationalised in the paper (ie, a measurement procedure is given), and so the sentence has empirical content (it could be wrong, but isn't).
My approach was to take stereotypical schemas, populate them with nouns that are drawn from the same stereotypical set of actors, but in surreal ways, and then tweak them until they are right on the edge of bullshit. That one was originally "Although many people seek apples, few seek the banana", for example. So it's not too surprising they are close to the boundary of banal "profundities".
I am slightly confused by the selection of those sentences, the bullshit sentences barely make grammatical sense, while the profound sentences are honestly pretty banal and sound like things you'd find written on tote-bags sold in etsy stores.
I found the study pretty interesting especially table 2 is extremely informative!
> 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.
As someone who grew up and studied in Sweden I'd be surprised if a random selection of the population were able to parse those sentences well enough to make a qualified judgement to begin with.
And then there's the question of how 'profound' the second set is to begin with..
>> Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”).
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?
How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.
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.
>> How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.
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).
If there isn't a concrete example of the statement that you can discover, then it's up to the person who uttered the phrase to give you one. If they can't do that, they are likely bullshitting.
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.
What you say seems to go hand in hand with the article's conclusion.
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.
Bullshit isn't EVEN wrong... its meaningless quackery that uses words people who don't understand find important (intelligence signalling). Profundity is in the eye of the beholder, and I may sometimes argue about specifics, but like stereotypes it has some value even in refutation or outside of its field...F=ma!
There are certainly statements that are easy to identify as bullshit or not; the problem is what happens with the probably much larger set that's somewhere in the middle.
I think the author meant that "profound" is something that takes a lot of thought to understand, whereas "bullshit" is something that has no meaning.If you find a profound meaning in it, you're "bullshit-insensitive".
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.
A statement can take a lot of thinking to understand because it's carrying some deep truth for which we lack natural insight- or, just because it has no meaning and therefore cannot be understood.
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.
I mean more that the paper compares meaningless statements with difficult but meaningful statements. Rather than the common term of "bullshit" meaning lies or something disagreeable.
The author probably should have defined "bullshit" more accurately, but the paper seems to be purposely abstruse.
Trying to point out faults, not because it adds to the conversation but only because it makes us feel superior, is a common trait among HN commenters. A social experiment that might explain some of our own behavior is the ideal subject. It’s a social experiment, for gods sake, that’s not hard science at all!
I don't know if they mention it in the article, but those BS quotes are eerily similar to those generated by http://wisdomofchopra.com/ and I think that might have been what they used.
There might be a reason for that. I think a lot the "bullshitness" of the sentences comes from the way the individual words do have meaning - however, the combinations of words used do not have an unambiguous meaning.
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.
As someone who picked out the "two categories" of statements with 100% accuracy before looking at the answers...
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).
Conterargument is that unhappy creative people exist and are not rare. So does bigoted closed minded creative people.
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.
There might be slightly positive causal correlations between health and creativity (probably not too strong though because there are lots of mentally deranged successful artists), and, more plausibly, between tolerance and creativity, but that's not enough profundity. It does not give you that "kick" of information gain you get from the profound sentences. It abuses a poetic/proverbial form to only state weak to non-existent causal associations and henceforth it is bullshit.
It's really hard to be creative if all your attention is pulled by your body failing, impending death, and the inadequacies of everyone and everything around you.
It's a lot easier to be a content consumer while in poor physical/mental health than to be a content creator.
To be fair, it says "for the future", not "only for the future". If I say "these reforms will ensure a clean environment for the next generation", I'm not ruling out the possibility that they'll also do so for the current generation.
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
> 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.
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.
To describe it as a "beauty" means it is beautiful by definition. The point is that it undergoes a transformation in your head upon some deeper meaning being revealed.
IMO it is only Art if you feel something immediately. If you have to read some description to get the meaning, it is only pretentious and not Art for me.
Just curious: Why does art need to make anyone feel anything?
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.)
I think art should make feel at least someone something in order to be considered as art.
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).
The problem with art is that it could be a stated goal of the art form to minimise "feeling" and still be considered valid. In this case, if you feel something, the art form has failed.
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.
If you read about it before you see it, will that destroy all art? How will you know? What about our societal social context and the art that came before it, or the artists creative arc?
I am considering a Feynman detector for bullshit (as defined in the article): See if you can come up with a specific example that the sentence describes. If you can a point to a specific example which works, the sentence is not bullshit.
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?
Surely those questions are just a reading comprehension test? I.e. can you read some difficult and somewhat abstract sentences and see if they have any rational (metaphorical or whatev) meaning?
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.
Bullshit-sensitivity and cynicism are practically synomyms I'd say.
It feels counter-intuitive to find cynicism positively correlated with prosocial behaviour (which the article defines as donating to and/or joining a charity.)
I see it as straightforward - bullshit results in contagious sociopathy.
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.
The headline 'Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior' contradicts the summary from the abstract where it basically says: Profoundness-receptivity has a positive association with prosocial behaviour whereas bullshit-receptivity has a negative association with prosocial behavior.
So if you go by the abstract the results match your intuition!
Bullshit-sensitivity = ability to distinguish bullshit sentences from genuinely profound sentences
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.
I think you can be extremely apt at detecting bullshit without being a cynic. In fact I think a lot, though certainly not all, of cynicism stems from the disappointment of having been fooled too much by bullshit.
I guess this means that many "IT professionals" don't even reflect enough to clearly detect rubbish even after a fad is over.
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.
Putting disagreements of what does and does not belong there aside there are also sunk costs of sorts - if everything works sufficiently learning a new way puts you at a disadvantage unless the new way really is sufficently appreciably better for the application so you stick with what you know. Not doing so ironically itself leads to faddish behavior and falling behind due to tripping on hidden pitfalls.
I think that's the key! On a personal note - I have tremendous difficulty reconciling kindness and cynicism in personal relationships. This reached an apex when I was dating an extremely kind and energetic girl, but couldn't help roll my eyes all the time at mentions of astrology and the universe talking to her through four-leafed clovers. I am not fully sold on cynicism being a virtue.
I don't think they are the same. People who bullshit a lot do try to frame those able to see through it as cynics, to make it harder for bullshit sensitive person to convince third parties about bullshit.
> It feels counter-intuitive to find cynicism positively correlated with prosocial behaviour (which the article defines as donating to and/or joining a charity.)
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.
I noticed most of the bullshit phrases used a lot of big, _fancy_ words. Not sure if this was covered later in the paper, but it could be this study identified a correlation between language skills and prosocial behavior.
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.
It is kind of interesting--maybe irrelevant to the paper, but all the "profound" sentences rely on a comparison:
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.
whereas the "bullshit" sentences seem mostly to be simpler constructs.
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.
there are no comparisons in them. I wonder if that has anything to do with just the structure we're used to for aphorisms and folk wisdom?
The bullshit sentences don’t even really make sense, not at a deep “having a think about it” level but just on a surface read they all sound weird - not hard to detect them as bullshit I wouldn’t have thought.
I define bullshit as self-interested talk, that uses both truth and lies. It doesn't have to be lie, it's just presenting truth and lies in order to manipulate the other. There is always something to gain for the bullshitter - money, relationships, advantages or to get out of obligations.
I think their definition of BS is in line with the academic literature on this, ie Frankfurt's seminal booklet (that the NYT had a hard time reviewing, because their editorial policy did not let them spell out what the whole book was about :-), namely statements that are not even concerned with truth, but just seek to impress.
I define bullshit as using big words and social proof, to present a conceptual theory (split) that might have some merit, but isn't particularly insightful.
It's entirely possible that they weren't testing "bullshit-sensitivity," but some underlying language skills, IQ, or even something like creativity (required to give the sentences have meaning). I don't think that they test has sufficient evidence that it measures what they claim it measures.
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.
> Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior.
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.
What does that even actually prove? Like, of course people who can distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable are likely to be smarter, more experienced and more responsible, and thus contribute more to the society. If somebody is not very bright as to not even tell the BS from the sensible, then surely they also can't have the intelligence and smartness and resolve to actually contribute to the community in meaningful ways. Hell, they might well even put a load of money and support into foolhardy schemes that absolutely don't work and damage the community, or that are downright scams. On the contrary, smart people of course would know where to dedicate their money/efforts for the maximum effect on the society as a whole.
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.
>The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.
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.
But the so-called 'genuinely profound sentences' are themselves subjective.
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"
The moral isn’t that you should try something new. It’s that if you’re trying something new and not doing great with it — and feeling embarrassed about it, keep soldiering on. Embarrassment is a natural part of the process.
I have trouble taking meaning from the "bullshit" sentences. At some point in trying, part of my brain begs me to give up while another asks me to go on.
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?
Having been scarred for life from accidental exposure to the drivel of dozens of cryptocurrency "thought leaders," I think the authors may have chosen prosocial behavior as the wrong correlation.
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
I believe the paper makes a distinction between bullshit receptivity (Eating it up), bullshit sensitivity (Calling it out), and profoundness sensitivity (Correctly identifying profound statements). Donating was positively correlated with profoundness sensitivity and less so to bullshit sensitivity. And slightly negatively with bullshit receptivity.
Maybe. If you give different individuals the task "translate this gobbledygook into coherent English", and you get a bunch of different translations and a bunch of "can't be done" answers, I think the "can't be done" group are right. If everyone who comes up with the same translation ends up with the same answer, then presumably that mening was actually there.
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.
-----
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:
I think this is actually a study designed to determine who can detect bullshit studies. "Bullshit-sensitivity" here appears to mean "reading comprehension."
It's telling that the profound statements are inherently prosaic. So are they really 'profound' or categorized so because they can be tied to some kind of natural or observable or relatable phenomena. I guess that doesn't matter since we are tying this to prosocial behavior, the idea here is to identify what can induce the feeling of 'birds of a feather' (at least, that's my take of it).
The bullshit statements were easy to pick out because they're too abstract or require lateral thinking.
i kinda found the description of the "non-bullshit" statements as being "genuinely profound" to be also a little "bullshitty". Personally would have described them as pithy rather.
*
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!