Bullshit susceptibility - there's lies, nonsense, and bullshit. Are you susceptible to bullshit? by 1kiki

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Bullshit susceptibility - there's lies, nonsense, and bullshit. Are you susceptible to bullshit?

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Saturday, December 5, 2015 15:25
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Saturday, December 5, 2015 12:19 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

Gordon Pennycook
James Allan Cheyne
Nathaniel Barr
Derek J. Koehler
Jonathan A. Fugelsang

Abstract

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation.
Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”).
Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.

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Saturday, December 5, 2015 9:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I think the Introduction says what the paper is about much better than the Abstract, which is too abstract for me:

1 Introduction http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” - Harry Frankfurt

In On Bullshit, the philosopher Frankfurt (2005) defines bullshit as something that is designed to impress but that was constructed absent direct concern for the truth. This distinguishes bullshit from lying, which entails a deliberate manipulation and subversion of truth (as understood by the liar). There is little question that bullshit is a real and consequential phenomenon. Indeed, given the rise of communication technology and the associated increase in the availability of information from a variety of sources, both expert and otherwise, bullshit may be more pervasive than ever before. Despite these seemingly commonplace observations, we know of no psychological research on bullshit. Are people able to detect blatant bullshit? Who is most likely to fall prey to bullshit and why?

http://charles-hall.deviantart.com/art/firefly-oil-sketch-571941272

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, December 5, 2015 9:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Jumping to the Conclusion of http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf (By the way, having a prejudiced opinion about Deepak Chopra will help you quickly get to the point of understanding.)

Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. [20? I had no idea! Give him a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama won one, so why not Chopra?] Bullshit is not only common; it is popular. 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.

http://moodybeatlegirl.deviantart.com/art/Big-Damn-Heroes-557325248

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, December 5, 2015 12:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So, seeing the article's title. I took this as a challenge.

Unfortunately, in some cases I seem to be a bullshittee. For example, I can construct a meaning from

Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena

What I would get out of that is that a single gas molecule would experience all of its rapid random motion, but if you were to average those motions over a large number of molecules, there would be very little net motion. And if you were to repeat that averaging over the entire universe (which is infinite) ALL phenomena cancel out. Seeking the infinite POV, isn't that the basis of Zen? (I don't think it's do-able, but the stillness of the infinite COULD be a phenomenon, I suppose.)

Fortunately, I've redeemed myself

by not being able to make ANY sense of Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. Because if this abstract beauty is "unparalleled", why does it need to be "transformed"? Also, the sentence by itself doesn't tell me what the abstract beauty is transformed into. So .... nah.

The other one that I made no sense of is ... Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation. This implies some sort of "power of the mind": all I have to do is think about something hard enough, and it will come into being (made manifest). Now, people have attributed this capability of "willing into existence" to an imaginary creature called "god", but I'd say most people get past that wish-fulfillment fantasy ("I can fly, I KNOW I can fly!") at a pretty early age. Not Deepak!

I wanted to follow up on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005), http://www.sjdm.org/dmidi/Cognitive_Reflection_Test.html

and the Raven's test
https://www.raventest.net/ (Except if you you do this test on this site you have to pay to get your score)

Anyway, this was an interesting paper, and lots of fun!

--------------
You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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Saturday, December 5, 2015 3:25 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Anyway, this was an interesting paper, and lots of fun!

I am uncertain just how close in meaning the word humbug is to the word bullshit. Of course, the words are not freely and fully interchangeable; it is clear that they are used differently. But the difference appears on the whole to have more to do with considerations of gentility, and certain other rhetorical parameters, than with the strictly literal modes of significance that concern me most. It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say “Humbug!” than to say “Bullshit!” For the sake of this discussion, I shall assume that there is no other important difference between the two, Black suggests a number of synonyms for humbug, including the following: “balderdash”, “claptrap”, “hokum”, “drivel”, “buncombe”, “imposture”, and “quackery”. This list of quaint equivalents is not very helpful.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040212054855/http://www.jelks.nu/misc/art
icles/bs.html

Firefly / Mad Max: Fury Road crossover. I'd say the belief in this poster is chromed Humbug.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040212054855/http://www.jelks.nu/misc/art
icles/bs.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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