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.
>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.
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)
> 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.
>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.
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*.
> 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.
> 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.
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!).
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).
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!
>> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[+] [-] duopixel|7 years ago|reply
*
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!
[+] [-] Timpy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foldr|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] null000|7 years ago|reply
Come on people, this is just loosely correlated with donating time and money to charity in a study that has decent odds of having primarily been done to grab headlines - don't take it too personally, and maybe go donate if you're really that concerned. Don't feel too defined by a 13 question true/false quiz.
(Disclaimer: I fall in the "1 wrong" group)
[+] [-] gcbw2|7 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] asteli|7 years ago|reply
I interpreted this one as referencing doppler shift of light emitted by celestial objects due to relative motion, but apparently I was overthinking this.
[+] [-] methodover|7 years ago|reply
There has to be a typo here, right?
I marked this as “bullshit” because it doesn’t make sense. But the link says it’s not bullshit...
[+] [-] pixl97|7 years ago|reply
This one annoys me, because of it's ether/or proposition when it is more of a and/or function.
Yes, water including rivers cuts through rocks in more than one way. For example, Ph differences in the water can cause chemical weathering of the rock. In general these effects happen slowly and need to be persistent for any measurable effect.
But to deny the absolute power of a raging torrent and the amount of physical landscape change it is capable of in just moments is absolute folly. A swift river full of sand and chunks of rock can act like a water cutter or a sand blaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods are a testament to the power of water.
[+] [-] traek|7 years ago|reply
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
"BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS"
“CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING"
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] O2F2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ak39|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malloryerik|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
Can I call BS on getting the first its right and the 2nd one wrong?
On that subject, I would have classified 5 differently but it seems to be the highest score of the BS sentences so I guess it's debatable
[+] [-] whatsstolat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sophistication|7 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] dionidium|7 years ago|reply
They're otherwise pretty obvious.
[+] [-] everybodyknows|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sporkologist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmart123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rezeroed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] folli|7 years ago|reply
Pseudo-profound bullshit statement: "Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"; can the reader distinguish this bullshit paper from a profound paper?
[+] [-] FabHK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ak39|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve1977|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|7 years ago|reply
- The unknown flees from the implausible.
- Unheard elephants are never green.
- Although many people seek apples, few seek the road.
- Judgement is like chewing on expensive rubber.
- A circle is a square with intention.
[+] [-] awild|7 years ago|reply
I found the study pretty interesting especially table 2 is extremely informative!
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] js8|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kurthr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muzani|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] boooooo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabs_masterrace|7 years ago|reply
This one is classified bullshit, although I think it makes at least somewhat sense.
[+] [-] js8|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] cjensen|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] barking|7 years ago|reply
It feels counter-intuitive to find cynicism positively correlated with prosocial behaviour (which the article defines as donating to and/or joining a charity.)
[+] [-] Devon64327|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abruzzi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonbarker87|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhdc1|7 years ago|reply
As someone who has experience with both, my bullshit senses are tingling.
[+] [-] visarga|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] austincheney|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SZJX|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomp|7 years ago|reply