Where do favourable views of Taylor Swift or Ayn Rand sit on this scale? Despite being a bit of a lefty, I can't help but think this article is itself bullshit.
If I can tell correctly, these statements were used as examples of bullshit (from [1]):
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract
beauty.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
4. The future explains irrational facts.
5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events.
6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.
7. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means an unveiling of the unrestricted.
8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.
9. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.
10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.
(I definitely fall prey to 4.)
Some additional commentary (from [2]):
> Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following, which is not bullshit:
> “Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract”.
I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to.
If we pick the political group "professionals" then Jeff Schmidt's book 'Disciplined Minds' may offer some insights. (It's not really about bullshit, but it is an excellent read).
Well ... go to everydayfeminism/reason/(whatever the favorite watering hole for anarchists is). Extract the most common in group lingo words. Mash them together and check.
The tribal nature of the internet means there is lots of bullshit content generated as in group signaling/pandering (warning, this statement may also be bullshit)
> Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure.
That also describes accurately the pitch of some startups that I was in contact with recently. Blockchain, big data and cloud and 15 more in various permutations.
Except "facts" are generally defined as statements for which you have good reasons to consider them true, and "irrationality" is considering stuff true without a good reason.
Yes, except that Statement 4, as written, implies that the future always explains irrational facts. This is bordering on magical, teleological thinking. There is no guarantee that all seemingly irrational observations today will necessarily be explained in the future. One would certainly hope that we'll gradually uncover all of life's mysteries as we progress in the sciences. But that is by no means assured.
Like I said, though, it's definitely the strongest statement in the list. It comes the closest to actual profundity. Statement 4 is good bullshit, while some of the others are pure horseshit.
These are hard to read, and I'm assuming people often "give up" and assume they're missing something and defer to apparent authority. That said, I could imagine an insufferable bit of waffle preceding some of these sentences that might make them at least coherent in that context, and it perhaps this feeling of reserving judgement that lets these examples slip through people's radar.
It is also worth noting that just because these were generated randomly does not necessarily mean they are nonsense! (Unsound arguments can lead to true conclusions and all that).
These are hard to read, and I'm assuming people often "give up" and assume they're missing something and defer to apparent authority
But that could be a point: Whether you, faced with such a sentence, conclude "I'm too stupid to understand this but it sounds like it probably means something important" or ask yourself "what is this even supposed to mean" does show something about your attitude.
These are hard to read, and I'm assuming people often "give up" and assume they're missing something and defer to apparent authority
But that could be a point: Whether you, faced with such a sentence, conclude "I'm too stupid to understand this but it sounds like it probably means something important" or ask yourself "what is this even supposed to mean" does show something about your attitude.
Maybe, but it is highly influenced by your self confidence in understanding complicated discourse, which is in turn often tied to your cultural and educational level. It would take little changes to those sentences to totally fool me while still being bs.
A biologist, a theoretical physicist and such could easily bs the crap out of me, unless I had reasons not to trust them in the first place.
That is true, but then they should have made a control test where they give complicated but true sentences to the same people, checking if they obey to the authority of the language as well. In that case they are not susceptible to bullshit, but merely have given up on 'elite' discussions. Which might both explain voting for Trump and working in Mechanical Turk.
These are not all bullshit statements. My summary at bottom.
Here are my ratings where 0 = nonsense, 10 = profound statement.
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
I rate this an 8/10 and read it as an excerpt from a review of a piece by an abstract painter. It says two things: firstly (though this comes at the end), that in purely aesthetic terms the beauty of the piece is unparalleled. I'd like to see it! But secondly, that the reviewer knows some hidden meaning that transforms this beauty in some way. Presumably I could be told what that hidden meaning is if I read the full review. I definitely want to see the painting! The construction of the sentence is also highly satisfying.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
This is an 7/10, but only because it is not such a deep observation. It says something very specific. It says that if you are creative, but only in a subtle way, then if you enjoy good health you are more likely to follow through on your subtle visions. So if you're in a slightly, but not very, creative profession such as technical writer or you are a food scientist for Nabisco, then if you improve your health you are more likely to be in "top form" and have the energy to actually make something you're thinking about a reality. I don't personally agree with this statement, and it does not seem to be very deep. Other things that would top "good health" as a way to impart reality to subtle creativity include: financial independence; a supporting partner; free time; a sponsor; drugs. The sentence is certainly meaningful however.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
This is meaningless to me, as "infinite phenomena" is on its face a meaningless descriptor, it just doesn't apply to anything, and even if it did, the idea of quieting them is meaningless, and even if quieting them meant something, wholeness doesn't mean anything to me. 0/10: the same as a markov chain writing.
4. The future explains irrational facts.
12/10 for profundity and statement.
Luke 8:17: "For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad."
The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply profound statement.
I'd also like to point out that Isaiah 40:4 and Isaiah 40:5 state: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken." says roughly the same thing. But what does the bit about valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or it's literal but weird, or it's just random nonsense. Our #4 is much, much more profound.
Plus, it's very easy to see how it applies directly to weird actions by someone that can later be revealed not to be weird at all. This can apply to companies, to Tesla, to SpaceX, whatever. It's a deep statement.
5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events.
0/10. Markov chain output. "Space time events" simply doesn't refer to anything.
6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.
This is hard to judge. I will give it 1/10 but want to click through for the context to see what the author might mean by "the nexus" such that it can be something you can align with. On its face it seems kind of ridiculous to align yourself with a nexus. A "self-aware blossoming of being" is, at best, an absolutely ham-fisted way to phrase anything. This is a terrible sentence without some kind of context.
If you phrase #4 as "There's a chance that what seems irrational today will make sense in the future" then it makes perfect sense. You can't understand it yet because you don't have all the facts (or enough wisdom to understand the facts).
However, it could also be read as "Everything makes perfect sense, given enough time" and that is pure bullshit. Some things are irrational now and always will be.
> 5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 0/10. Markov chain output. "Space time events" simply doesn't refer to anything.
I'd give it a 0/10 too, but really, all concrete events are space-time events, in that they are locatable on the space-time continuum. Fictional, abstract, or hypothetical events may or may not be on the space-time continuum.
It's funny how you quote the bible as if it had any authority on profundity, given that it is full of equally vacuous bullshit, including the verses you quote.
It seems to me like that demonstrates (a) how real the effect is that this study measured, and (b) what the basic mechanism is that makes it happen: Religious people tend to start with statements that they have decided they want to believe without any actual reason and then they go out and try to find reasons, no matter how metaphorical or analogous these reasons might be, and thus no matter how much these reasons actually logically and empirically support the statement at hand. Scientifically minded people on the other hand tend to reject statements until they have evidence that supports them, so they aren't invested into finding reasons to believe, because they care more about what is actually true.
That's also why religions consistently fail at discovering true facts about the world (or in other words: why they fail at rejecting bullshit), while science yields all the progress we make in understanding the world (which in particular means rejecting all the bullshit).
It's funny how you can say someone "quotes the bible as if it had any authority on profundity" after that person wrote "But what does the bit about valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or it's literal but weird, or it's just random nonsense."
The study was about bullshit meaning literal, meaningless nonsense statements, like "Imagination is inside exponential space time events." If you can't tell the difference between meaningless statements and ones that are simply wrong you are no better than the editors who accepted this hoax paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Well, I would say that you didn't make yourself particularly clear, then :-)
Yes, you did list the possibility that that quote might just be random nonsense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that is what you think is the case. In particular given that you also wrote this:
> The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply profound statement.
I don't see how there is anything profound about this. It's just a baseless assertion, as far as I can tell. So, while it's a step beyond just random gibberish, in that there is some semantic meaning to this, it's still just a deepity ( http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity ).
I'm sorry, I must have let the fact that the document I chose as a basis for comparison (and which I don't believe) influences the lives of 2.2 billion people every day and has for hundreds of years cloud me into thinking that it is more "profound" - as a basis of comparison - than if a pack of peanuts says "may contain peanuts" on it. /s
In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)
> In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)
I think you are using an unusual definition of "profound", then?
To quote the relevant definition from the oxford dictionary:
"(Of a person or statement) having or showing great knowledge or insight"
I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false insight"?
Now, there is a "feeling of profundity", which indeed does not depend on truth, but which can be evoked by, for example, statements that (to a particular person) seem profound, but actually aren't, but also just by certain experiences.
>I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false insight"?
sure it would be met. your usage is obviously not what anybody means by profound. your usage suggests someone can say "I just read a really speculative physics paper which might be really profound, if it's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to test it today, so it's impossible to know whether it's profound or not. But it would certainly be interesting if it turned out to be profound!"
Go ahead and find a single person online talking in such terms about whether a journal article in a hard science is profound or not, where if it turns out to be true it's profound but if it turns out to be false it's not profound. Profound is a common word. Find a single person using it in science the way you suggest I use it.
Well, I see your point, but I think that's actually more a matter of how exactly you define "truth" and of colloquial use of language.
If a paper has obvious errors in it that make it highly questionable whether any of the results are reliable, then you wouldn't call that profound, would you? I mean, it must be at the very least plausible that it's true after some critical reading. And I'd even go further: For example, a paper can be profound because of a new perspective, even if the specific results are actually wrong. But the reason that it is still considered profound is because the new perspective still "has truth to it", in the sense that it matches reality well enough to be a useful tool for generating future results.
From someone who doesn't have sufficient knowledge to judge the reliability of some result, I would indeed expect them to say something along the lines "this might be profound".
Also, if a paper that at some point is considered profound turns out to be completely untrue and useless, people would probably stop refering to it as profound?
Which is all in contrast to some "feeling of profundity", which really might be a purely emotional matter.
thanks for collecting these. I was very curious what the research team thought constituted "profound sounding bullshit". now that I've seen it I am inclined to believe that this is actually just some kind of cultural or communication gaps. quite a few of those sentences can be "translated" to very pedestrian, non-controversial, and obvious sounding statements that even the most hard nosed materialist scientist would probably accept. Let me try a few.
> Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena
Translation: a healthy and balanced lifestyle is helpful for the purpose of feeling less bothered/annoyed/irritated by the things in the world.
> Imagination is inside exponential space time events
Translation: Imagination is a behavior of the mind/brain
> We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself
Translation: Recently, more people have expressed in interest in spiritual and religious practice
are my translations good or meaningful? am I just falling into the bullshit trap myself? who knows. I think we would all benefit from being less judgmental of others who communicate using different symbols and turns of phrase than the ones we are accustomed to, though. Its a pretty vicious and petty culture that disparages people who have different preferences for their favorite metaphors. I'm really failing to see the benefit in saying "this is bullshit and if you believe it isn't then you're an idiot." which seems to largely be the point of the research.
and yes, I do know that some of these were generated semi-randomly by a computer program. that doesn't exclude the potential for meaning. the words were chosen by someone originally, after all. language is tricky. the words can mean things beyond the original context they were produced in.
You're completely ignoring words that don't fit into your translations. For the first one... you forgot to explain the word "infinite." For the second, you forgot to explain the word "exponential.". The third.. umm.. WTF is "the nexus itself."
For most people these statements are meaningless. To say "I can assign basically random meanings, if I just say whatever I think of first, ignoring inconsistencies between the statement and the translation".... Well you're just pointing out the exact problem.
translations are always problematic. I assure you I didn't ignore those words though. I may, however, be a poor translator. Or you may be a poor reader. Or both. Those weren't "basically random meanings" or "whatever I think of first" though.
The point is that at the semantic level these statements are random noise. Sure you can see a signal in it if you look hard enough, but what you are actually doing is over-fitting. Some of these statements look like they might be meaningful, but that's just like generating 5 random points and finding that they are roughly in a line.
The finding here is that people on the conservative end are more prone to doing this semantic over-fitting than people on the liberal end. Sure, the sample is self-selected and not representative, but the results are still intriguing. The next step is to replicate this with a better sample, or at least a different one.
I think the research is of such dubious quality in both experimental design, and unfounded underlying assumptions, that I wouldn't trust its results further than I could spit.
The next step is not to replicate this with a better sample, but to seriously question the underlying assumptions that lead the research team to even attempt a study of this kind in the first place.
I can think of better ways to "validate" your own in-group preferred belief system, language, politics, and whatever other kinds of tribal identifiers they want. The most dubious part of this exercise is not that its possible for people to do line-fitting on the bullshit sentences. Its that the research team has such a poor understanding of language and communication that they would think their experiment was anything more than an exercise in tribal piss-marking.
Ah, the thing, the thing is that they are and they are not bullshit. It depends on how generous we are with the statements. Suppose that someone you respect, but that doesn't have much command of English, wrote this. And try to figure out the meaning:
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
What we perceive depends on what we know.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
Being healthy, i.e. balanced, will show you solutions that you wouldn't see otherwise.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
The solution to the existential pain of eternity is to focus on everything that is happening to you this millisecond.
4.The future explains irrational facts.
In the future, things that don't make sense now, will.
10. ...the essence of nature is joy.
For the most part, nature is just delighted to be. Don't believe me? Go play with a puppy.
Funnily, the correlation is higher for Cruz than Trump, also the correlation of mundane statements with profoundness is higher for Clinton (higher than the corr. of BS with Trump)
Trump's campaign personality is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal. The things he says are often stupid, dangerous or wrong, but they're not bullshit in the sense of the OP's study.
"We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about the same topic.
Doesn't the latter actually mean something? I agree the structure of the sentence is a bit tortured, but it clearly means that someone should advocate vehemently for the two governments to set up a meeting to discuss how to help out people living on the border.
The latter sentence was the first empty thing that came to my mind, so any meaning is accidental. Even though it superficially means something, there's no "who, what, how" in that sentence: who should advocate for the dialogue, what that dialogue should consist of, or how it would help the people.
Certainly true. I didn't mean that Trump has never been a bullshitter (and presumably still is in many other contexts); rather that his campaign personality is strongly built around this perception of "lack of bullshit".
I haven't read the full article yet but this reminds me of a study last year "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" which was published in the journal Judgment & Decision Making and was a fun read[1].
I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny:
> Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3 Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own bullshit.
The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit.
As an outsider, I found the technical term the profession chose (according to the study, I don't know that branch of study myself), to be profoundly distracting. The profession made a really bad choice by choosing to go with it.
It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual attractiveness called it "fuckability
".
The profession should have called it "nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.
It's annoyed me periodically as well, in part because it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "technical term" (its precise definition is quite slippery between authors), and in part because to the extent there is well-defined content, it's mostly just PR trying to oversell more narrow results, which would be better called by some more accurate term.
Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of his book On Bullshit. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and gets old if you keep repeating it.
For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do you need a very large sample. It's got to do with the fact that our brains largely function the same. Your sample has to be large and random enough to be fairly confident that you didn't accidentally pick a significant amount of people with some sort of mental divergence (i.e. very low IQ, very high IQ, autism, psychopathy, etc..) that could be relevant.
I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon Turk.
Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population bias we think the paper might have:
People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas when they also are susceptible to bullshit.
What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is the measured correlation?
edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share. Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm not a psych student.
>For most psychological research you don't need a very random sample, nor do you need a very large sample.
Heck, as long as you get published and get a grant, any size or representativeness of sample will do (even straight made up statistics, if there's no big fear of being found out).
The view you're espousing is wrong. When you actually test if what you're calling human universals actually are universal, you generally find they're not:
"Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self-concepts. This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address these challenges."
(The thin slice of humanity referred to above is westernized college students. Perhaps mechanical turkers do not suffer from this bias? seems unlikely though)
Thanks! That's interesting, seems I might have had it wrong. I should've brought that up during my friends master thesis presentation, maybe he wouldn't have got his diploma ;) Are psychology researchers in general aware of this review? Obviously my friends master thesis was just a small inconsequential study, but if the universals that are now commonly used have turned out to not actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of researchers have to retract/redo their research?
> but if the universals that are now commonly used have turned out to not actually be true wouldn't that mean huge swathes of researchers have to retract/redo their research?
Reproducibility is a major concern. Many experiments are poorly designed.
I see this as far more sociological than psychological, where the standards for sufficiently large and random samples are much higher. It's wrapping too many particularities of todays politics to be immune to failures in fair distribution outside IQ and mental illness.
you don't need a very random sample, nor do you
need a very large sample. It's got to do with the
fact that our brains largely function the same.
Do you think, if I did a study of political leanings among college undergraduates, that I'd get the same results as a study of the general population because "our brains work the same" ?
This is not a study of political leanings of people. It's a study of the correlation between a characteristic of a person and their political leaning.
If you take 200 college undergraduates, let's say 80% of them are lefties. That means you will have 160 lefties and 40 righties. Then of the 160 lefties 50 believe in BS (31%) and of the 40 righties 16 (40%) believe in BS, you can take those numbers to your statistician and ask him whether that spread is significant.
Just the idea that the correlation is there for these college students, where you might not expect it would be there for college students is a hint that maybe this could hold up for the population in general. At the least it could warrant for a larger investigation.
Even the paper itself acknowledges the weaknesses of the sample. It's much easier to make "based on consistent responses in our sample, humans generally behave in a certain way" generalisations from a small, unrepresentative sample than to conclude "this cohort of humans we've unrepresentatively sampled generally behaves differently from that cohort of humans we've unrepresentatively sampled"
Consider the hypothesis that (for the sake of simplicity) half of conservatives support conservative candidates because they're "susceptible to bullshit" and half of conservatives support them because they're hardworking professionals who believe those candidates' brand of fiscal conservatism is most aligned with their rational self interest in not being taxed too highly.
Which of these two categories of Trump and Cruz supporters would be underrepresented on AMT, a place for underemployed people to find menial work?
There's some rather more fundamental issues with the paper.
Let's do a little bit of a dive...
1. The "BSR" is 10 questions on a Likert scale with extraordinarily vague labels. So, what's the difference between "somewhat profound" and "fairly profound"? How confident are you that different populations (eg lib v con) will have similar views on the difference between "somewhat" versus "fairly"?
2. Liberal/conservatism meanwhile is a single question on a Likert scale. 1 to 7, how conservative are you? So, self-image not actual conservatism. And given 109 participants rated themselves on the liberal side versus 46 on the conservative side, it's going to be dominated by "just how extreme do you think your liberalism is?"
3. But best fun of all -
On the left, we have
1 = liberal
1 = not at all profound
1 = not at all favourable
On the right side of their questions we have
7 = conservative
5 = very profound
5 = very favourable
109 participants were Liberal (less than 4 on lib/con Likert item)
46 participants were Conservative (above 4 on lib/con Likert item)
So, just the factor of "how much do you like to tick the extreme boxes on a Likert scale" would give a correlation like the one they get.
More likely to pick a 1 than a 2 on a Likert item? You'll rank as both more liberal and less receptive to bullshit then... Like to leave a radio box on the left so you don't feel extreme? That'll register you slightly more conservative and slightly more receptive then...
And as the participant pool is 2:1 liberal:conservatism, then that extremeness factor will produce candidate correlations like the ones they get too. (More extreme-tickers are likely to be going for 1s on lib, 1 not profound, 1 not favourable of Republicans, and 5s on favourability of Democrats. Middle-of-the-road tickers are likely to be going 2s for lib, 2s for profound, 2s for Reps, and 4s for Dems they like. Higher score for bullshit receptivity, less liberal, less favourable of Dems, and more favourable (less unfavourable) of Republicans.
MeanMundane is bang on the middle (3.1 mean), neatly unaffected by "extremeness" factor, whereas MeanBullshit isn't (2.6), so extremeness will push out the "controlled" correlations neatly too.
(Yes, I'm procrastinating, and had a brief back-of-the-envelope poke around their CSV of data...)
"we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for an online survey. Thus, one cannot make inferences about the entire population of the US (or other populations of other countries)"
plosOne is unfortunately fairly gamable with this sort of thing.
"We obtained complete data from 196 US-American individuals who participated in an online study via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where researchers can post jobs (such as responding to a questionnaire) which can be completed by users of Amazon Mechanical Turk Only demographic information about sex, age, and in what country participants live was collected"
I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew these results significantly.
Keeping aside the clearly political nature of the content, this study itself seems quite poorly designed & amateurish.
A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still, the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non-bullshit" statement pool.
Funny you should mention that, as I believe it's covered in the author's follow-on research paper "Misperceiving Bullshit as Profoud is Associated with Peer-Reviewers of Politically-Oriented plosOne Articles"
I had to chuckle at this passage from the first link:
> participants were shown a list of
activities (e.g., biking, reading) directly below the following
instructions: “Below is a list of leisure activities. If you are
reading this, please choose the “other” box below and type
in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved
rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing
The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!
This issue isn't just with students or compensation. A lot of the quality issues have more to do with serious questions of reading comprehension and the over use of (poorly designed) survey methodologies. It ends up being a lot like the 'democracy' complaints...its not a great method but it is better than all the others for what it does. Not only are 'attention check questions' common, there is some interesting research on their effectiveness.
Eventually, I suspect/hope that NLP and neural networks will enable more authentic data collection across many spectrums.
"To exclude the possibility that conservatives are more likely to see profoundness in statements in general, we additionally include simple, mundane statements in our study"
It's not discussed in the paper, but another important point is line between lies and bullshit, and the reality distorting effects of BS:
"For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are."
Didn't mean to imply that bullshit excludes lying, just that bullshit instead erodes the concept of truth in people's minds. Thankfully there are laws and records that are less easily eroded...
Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.
"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0]
How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large.
Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed:
"Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]"
So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism.
It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.
"It may be that this finding and the present research in general has an impact on some conservatives in that they might evaluate statements more critically. We invite individuals to start with the present contribution."
This needs to be very careful to avoid the mistake of taking "a sentence disagrees with science" as equivalent to "a sentence is pseudo profound bullshit" or you will get results that simply divide people into belief clades some of which are scientific and some of which are not.
An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in disagreement with science and a true statement in the belief system of western occult magic.
Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and label the whole of "not" as bullshit.
But it's extremely rare for a presidential candidate to ever make a truly profound statement.
One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the-fact explanation of it that he gave later [2].
"I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo."
This is funny and all but I fear their accepting articles like this damages the cause for PLoS long term. OA journals already have enough trouble with reputation and prestige, which is the main reason Elsevier et al are still in business, and articles like this (and there are too many examples IMO) don't really help.
> we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for an online survey.
I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals.
There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology. In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements.
When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid.
My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of baggage which this study does nothing to control.
122 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] thread1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
4. The future explains irrational facts.
5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events.
6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.
7. Consciousness consists of frequencies of quantum energy. “Quantum” means an unveiling of the unrestricted.
8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.
9. We are in the midst of a high frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.
10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.
(I definitely fall prey to 4.)
Some additional commentary (from [2]):
> Although this statement may seem to convey some sort of potentially profound meaning, it is merely a collection of buzzwords put together randomly in a sentence that retains syntactic structure. The bullshit statement is not merely non-sense, as would also be true of the following, which is not bullshit:
> “Unparalleled transforms meaning beauty hidden abstract”.
I wonder what kind of bullshit other political groups (liberals, libertarians, anarchists, ...) fall prey to.
[1] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/supp.pdf
[2] http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
An important question, certainly.
The tribal nature of the internet means there is lots of bullshit content generated as in group signaling/pandering (warning, this statement may also be bullshit)
That also describes accurately the pitch of some startups that I was in contact with recently. Blockchain, big data and cloud and 15 more in various permutations.
Put these in a nice image macro and I can imagine my facebook friends sharing on them their walls.
10, especially.
That said, I LMAO'd over #9.
In many cases, however, it turned out to be true.
Irrational fact: different yet highly optimized creatures live on this planet. Future explanation: evolution.
Irrational fact: some stars move faster than others. Future explanation: planets orbiting the sun.
Irrational fact: the planets' orbits aren't circles. Future explanation: Kepler's laws.
etc.
Like I said, though, it's definitely the strongest statement in the list. It comes the closest to actual profundity. Statement 4 is good bullshit, while some of the others are pure horseshit.
It is also worth noting that just because these were generated randomly does not necessarily mean they are nonsense! (Unsound arguments can lead to true conclusions and all that).
But that could be a point: Whether you, faced with such a sentence, conclude "I'm too stupid to understand this but it sounds like it probably means something important" or ask yourself "what is this even supposed to mean" does show something about your attitude.
But that could be a point: Whether you, faced with such a sentence, conclude "I'm too stupid to understand this but it sounds like it probably means something important" or ask yourself "what is this even supposed to mean" does show something about your attitude.
A biologist, a theoretical physicist and such could easily bs the crap out of me, unless I had reasons not to trust them in the first place.
Here are my ratings where 0 = nonsense, 10 = profound statement.
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
I rate this an 8/10 and read it as an excerpt from a review of a piece by an abstract painter. It says two things: firstly (though this comes at the end), that in purely aesthetic terms the beauty of the piece is unparalleled. I'd like to see it! But secondly, that the reviewer knows some hidden meaning that transforms this beauty in some way. Presumably I could be told what that hidden meaning is if I read the full review. I definitely want to see the painting! The construction of the sentence is also highly satisfying.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
This is an 7/10, but only because it is not such a deep observation. It says something very specific. It says that if you are creative, but only in a subtle way, then if you enjoy good health you are more likely to follow through on your subtle visions. So if you're in a slightly, but not very, creative profession such as technical writer or you are a food scientist for Nabisco, then if you improve your health you are more likely to be in "top form" and have the energy to actually make something you're thinking about a reality. I don't personally agree with this statement, and it does not seem to be very deep. Other things that would top "good health" as a way to impart reality to subtle creativity include: financial independence; a supporting partner; free time; a sponsor; drugs. The sentence is certainly meaningful however.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
This is meaningless to me, as "infinite phenomena" is on its face a meaningless descriptor, it just doesn't apply to anything, and even if it did, the idea of quieting them is meaningless, and even if quieting them meant something, wholeness doesn't mean anything to me. 0/10: the same as a markov chain writing.
4. The future explains irrational facts. 12/10 for profundity and statement.
Luke 8:17: "For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad."
The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply profound statement.
I'd also like to point out that Isaiah 40:4 and Isaiah 40:5 state: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken." says roughly the same thing. But what does the bit about valleys being raised up and mountains made low? It has to be some kind of metaphor, or it's literal but weird, or it's just random nonsense. Our #4 is much, much more profound.
Plus, it's very easy to see how it applies directly to weird actions by someone that can later be revealed not to be weird at all. This can apply to companies, to Tesla, to SpaceX, whatever. It's a deep statement.
5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events. 0/10. Markov chain output. "Space time events" simply doesn't refer to anything.
6. We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.
This is hard to judge. I will give it 1/10 but want to click through for the context to see what the author might mean by "the nexus" such that it can be something you can align with. On its face it seems kind of ridiculous to align yourself with a nexus. A "self-aware blossoming of being" is, at best, an absolutely ham-fisted way to phrase anything. This is a terrible sentence without some kind of context.
7. Consciousness consists of ...
"Imparts reality" is not the same as realization -- it's more like "instills reality" (shows "subtle creativity" what's real).
However, it could also be read as "Everything makes perfect sense, given enough time" and that is pure bullshit. Some things are irrational now and always will be.
Explaining an irrational fact doesn't imply validating it or turning into a rational one.
Explain: make (an idea, situation, or problem) clear to someone by describing it in more detail or revealing relevant facts or ideas.
I'd give it a 0/10 too, but really, all concrete events are space-time events, in that they are locatable on the space-time continuum. Fictional, abstract, or hypothetical events may or may not be on the space-time continuum.
It seems to me like that demonstrates (a) how real the effect is that this study measured, and (b) what the basic mechanism is that makes it happen: Religious people tend to start with statements that they have decided they want to believe without any actual reason and then they go out and try to find reasons, no matter how metaphorical or analogous these reasons might be, and thus no matter how much these reasons actually logically and empirically support the statement at hand. Scientifically minded people on the other hand tend to reject statements until they have evidence that supports them, so they aren't invested into finding reasons to believe, because they care more about what is actually true.
That's also why religions consistently fail at discovering true facts about the world (or in other words: why they fail at rejecting bullshit), while science yields all the progress we make in understanding the world (which in particular means rejecting all the bullshit).
The study was about bullshit meaning literal, meaningless nonsense statements, like "Imagination is inside exponential space time events." If you can't tell the difference between meaningless statements and ones that are simply wrong you are no better than the editors who accepted this hoax paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
You completely misread my comment.
Yes, you did list the possibility that that quote might just be random nonsense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that is what you think is the case. In particular given that you also wrote this:
> The (Christian) bible says there is NOTHING secret that shall not be made manifest. So anything that is a FACT (actually happened), however irrational-seeming or paradoxical, will be revealed in all its causes. This is a deeply profound statement.
I don't see how there is anything profound about this. It's just a baseless assertion, as far as I can tell. So, while it's a step beyond just random gibberish, in that there is some semantic meaning to this, it's still just a deepity ( http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity ).
In other words I don't think profound statements have to be true, and the article says people were judging profundity, not truth. (although this is irrelevant, I don't think the verses I quoted are true.)
I think you are using an unusual definition of "profound", then?
To quote the relevant definition from the oxford dictionary:
"(Of a person or statement) having or showing great knowledge or insight"
I don't exactly think that would be met by "incorrect knowledge" or "false insight"?
Now, there is a "feeling of profundity", which indeed does not depend on truth, but which can be evoked by, for example, statements that (to a particular person) seem profound, but actually aren't, but also just by certain experiences.
sure it would be met. your usage is obviously not what anybody means by profound. your usage suggests someone can say "I just read a really speculative physics paper which might be really profound, if it's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to test it today, so it's impossible to know whether it's profound or not. But it would certainly be interesting if it turned out to be profound!"
Go ahead and find a single person online talking in such terms about whether a journal article in a hard science is profound or not, where if it turns out to be true it's profound but if it turns out to be false it's not profound. Profound is a common word. Find a single person using it in science the way you suggest I use it.
If a paper has obvious errors in it that make it highly questionable whether any of the results are reliable, then you wouldn't call that profound, would you? I mean, it must be at the very least plausible that it's true after some critical reading. And I'd even go further: For example, a paper can be profound because of a new perspective, even if the specific results are actually wrong. But the reason that it is still considered profound is because the new perspective still "has truth to it", in the sense that it matches reality well enough to be a useful tool for generating future results.
From someone who doesn't have sufficient knowledge to judge the reliability of some result, I would indeed expect them to say something along the lines "this might be profound".
Also, if a paper that at some point is considered profound turns out to be completely untrue and useless, people would probably stop refering to it as profound?
Which is all in contrast to some "feeling of profundity", which really might be a purely emotional matter.
Have you ever watched an Orange Tree blooming?
> Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena
Translation: a healthy and balanced lifestyle is helpful for the purpose of feeling less bothered/annoyed/irritated by the things in the world.
> Imagination is inside exponential space time events
Translation: Imagination is a behavior of the mind/brain
> We are in the midst of a self aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself
Translation: Recently, more people have expressed in interest in spiritual and religious practice
are my translations good or meaningful? am I just falling into the bullshit trap myself? who knows. I think we would all benefit from being less judgmental of others who communicate using different symbols and turns of phrase than the ones we are accustomed to, though. Its a pretty vicious and petty culture that disparages people who have different preferences for their favorite metaphors. I'm really failing to see the benefit in saying "this is bullshit and if you believe it isn't then you're an idiot." which seems to largely be the point of the research.
and yes, I do know that some of these were generated semi-randomly by a computer program. that doesn't exclude the potential for meaning. the words were chosen by someone originally, after all. language is tricky. the words can mean things beyond the original context they were produced in.
For most people these statements are meaningless. To say "I can assign basically random meanings, if I just say whatever I think of first, ignoring inconsistencies between the statement and the translation".... Well you're just pointing out the exact problem.
It is itself, the very Nexus of itselfness.
The finding here is that people on the conservative end are more prone to doing this semantic over-fitting than people on the liberal end. Sure, the sample is self-selected and not representative, but the results are still intriguing. The next step is to replicate this with a better sample, or at least a different one.
The next step is not to replicate this with a better sample, but to seriously question the underlying assumptions that lead the research team to even attempt a study of this kind in the first place.
I can think of better ways to "validate" your own in-group preferred belief system, language, politics, and whatever other kinds of tribal identifiers they want. The most dubious part of this exercise is not that its possible for people to do line-fitting on the bullshit sentences. Its that the research team has such a poor understanding of language and communication that they would think their experiment was anything more than an exercise in tribal piss-marking.
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
What we perceive depends on what we know.
2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.
Being healthy, i.e. balanced, will show you solutions that you wouldn't see otherwise.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
The solution to the existential pain of eternity is to focus on everything that is happening to you this millisecond.
4.The future explains irrational facts.
In the future, things that don't make sense now, will.
10. ...the essence of nature is joy.
For the most part, nature is just delighted to be. Don't believe me? Go play with a puppy.
"We should build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" is not bullshit (and therefore it's easy to evaluate how wrong it is). "There needs to be a strong resolve to promote intergovernmental dialogue which can meaningfully improve the lives of millions along the border" would be an example of bullshit about the same topic.
The Trump University lawsuits are accusing Trump of fraud, which sounds exactly like bullshit to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
I edited my post to make this point clearer.
I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny:
> Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before. Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular.3 Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own bullshit. The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an important first step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is detected. Our bullshit receptivity scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit.
[1]http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html
It's literally vulgar slang. It's as though a report on being deemed sexual attractiveness called it "fuckability ". The profession should have called it "nonsense" or come up with some other qualifier, not chosen vulgar slang.
Imo the slang did work okay in its original formulation, where it was mostly just an attention-grabbing headline used by Harry Frankfurt as the title of his book On Bullshit. But that's a joke that works okay the first time, and gets old if you keep repeating it.
http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c0...
That's bound to be a representative sample.
I don't think picking nearly 200 people from Amazon Turk is going to risk that. But perhaps someone should research what kind of people are on Amazon Turk.
Fun exercise, let's modify the conclusion to reflect the specific population bias we think the paper might have:
People working for Amazon Turk are more likely to support conservative ideas when they also are susceptible to bullshit.
What is a much more important question: What is the distribution of conservative/non-conservative supporters in the group, and how significant is the measured correlation?
edit: Just as a disclaimer, I made this comment based on the psych master thesis presentation I've attended of a friend when I was at university where I posed the same question (N was only 16, and only local students were surveyed). He explained to me that for his particular research (pertaining correlation between auditory senses and motor skills) a small group was sufficient because of the fundamental brain structure we (mostly) all share. Whether that holds up for more complex research like this I don't know, I'm not a psych student.
Heck, as long as you get published and get a grant, any size or representativeness of sample will do (even straight made up statistics, if there's no big fear of being found out).
"Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self-concepts. This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address these challenges."
(The thin slice of humanity referred to above is westernized college students. Perhaps mechanical turkers do not suffer from this bias? seems unlikely though)
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Weird_People_BBS_H...
also see http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology... and http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... for pop write-ups.
Reproducibility is a major concern. Many experiments are poorly designed.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
So, yes, about 60% of research needs to be redone.
If you take 200 college undergraduates, let's say 80% of them are lefties. That means you will have 160 lefties and 40 righties. Then of the 160 lefties 50 believe in BS (31%) and of the 40 righties 16 (40%) believe in BS, you can take those numbers to your statistician and ask him whether that spread is significant.
Just the idea that the correlation is there for these college students, where you might not expect it would be there for college students is a hint that maybe this could hold up for the population in general. At the least it could warrant for a larger investigation.
Consider the hypothesis that (for the sake of simplicity) half of conservatives support conservative candidates because they're "susceptible to bullshit" and half of conservatives support them because they're hardworking professionals who believe those candidates' brand of fiscal conservatism is most aligned with their rational self interest in not being taxed too highly.
Which of these two categories of Trump and Cruz supporters would be underrepresented on AMT, a place for underemployed people to find menial work?
Let's do a little bit of a dive...
1. The "BSR" is 10 questions on a Likert scale with extraordinarily vague labels. So, what's the difference between "somewhat profound" and "fairly profound"? How confident are you that different populations (eg lib v con) will have similar views on the difference between "somewhat" versus "fairly"?
2. Liberal/conservatism meanwhile is a single question on a Likert scale. 1 to 7, how conservative are you? So, self-image not actual conservatism. And given 109 participants rated themselves on the liberal side versus 46 on the conservative side, it's going to be dominated by "just how extreme do you think your liberalism is?"
3. But best fun of all -
On the left, we have 1 = liberal 1 = not at all profound 1 = not at all favourable
On the right side of their questions we have 7 = conservative 5 = very profound 5 = very favourable
109 participants were Liberal (less than 4 on lib/con Likert item) 46 participants were Conservative (above 4 on lib/con Likert item)
So, just the factor of "how much do you like to tick the extreme boxes on a Likert scale" would give a correlation like the one they get.
More likely to pick a 1 than a 2 on a Likert item? You'll rank as both more liberal and less receptive to bullshit then... Like to leave a radio box on the left so you don't feel extreme? That'll register you slightly more conservative and slightly more receptive then...
And as the participant pool is 2:1 liberal:conservatism, then that extremeness factor will produce candidate correlations like the ones they get too. (More extreme-tickers are likely to be going for 1s on lib, 1 not profound, 1 not favourable of Republicans, and 5s on favourability of Democrats. Middle-of-the-road tickers are likely to be going 2s for lib, 2s for profound, 2s for Reps, and 4s for Dems they like. Higher score for bullshit receptivity, less liberal, less favourable of Dems, and more favourable (less unfavourable) of Republicans.
MeanMundane is bang on the middle (3.1 mean), neatly unaffected by "extremeness" factor, whereas MeanBullshit isn't (2.6), so extremeness will push out the "controlled" correlations neatly too.
(Yes, I'm procrastinating, and had a brief back-of-the-envelope poke around their CSV of data...)
"we want to note that the sample of the present study probably is not representative of the US as our study is restricted to the specific sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and has a relatively small sample size for an online survey. Thus, one cannot make inferences about the entire population of the US (or other populations of other countries)"
plosOne is unfortunately fairly gamable with this sort of thing.
I imagine the type of people who seek income from Mechanical Turk can skew these results significantly.
A well designed study would mix "bullshit" and "non-bullshit" statements of similar complexity and look at signals on both for comparison. Better still, the "bullshit" statements would be derived from mixing words from the "non-bullshit" statement pool.
PDF: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
And there's some followups...
Dalton 2016 - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923ac.pdf
Reply from Pennycook et al. - http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923ac/jdm15923acr.pdf
> participants were shown a list of activities (e.g., biking, reading) directly below the following instructions: “Below is a list of leisure activities. If you are reading this, please choose the “other” box below and type in ‘I read the instructions’”. This attention check proved rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing
The perils of using poorly compensated students for your studies!
Eventually, I suspect/hope that NLP and neural networks will enable more authentic data collection across many spectrums.
From the article itself
"For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off. … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are."
https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University
"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0]
How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large.
[0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...
[1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amaz...
"Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]"
[5] leads to:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909... Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing
So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism.
It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.
(emphasis mine)
An example, if I were to say, "a daily routine of banishing prevents the accumulation of low-level negative entities" that would be starkly in disagreement with science and a true statement in the belief system of western occult magic.
Unless of course you simply wish to detect scientificness versus not, and label the whole of "not" as bullshit.
One exception is Mike Gravel's performance art piece [1], and his after-the-fact explanation of it that he gave later [2].
"I figured out that this is a metaphor. That one is focusing on one life. And then you turn around, throw a rock. That creates ripples. And then you go off to your demise. And lo and behold, the drop in the water becomes our logo."
[1] Mike Gravel - Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8
[2] Mike Gravel Explains The Rock Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_zu3EHJAY
https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hom...
The League on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGP33tKSk&t=40s
Jason silva on love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OXfohJQdCA
I guess one can publish this kind of bullshit in Psychology journals.
There is a crucial difference between experimental economics, and psychology. In economics experiments, participants get paid based on their performance. In this context, that would translate to one's payoff being determined by how well one distinguishes between bullshit and mundane statements.
When people get rewarded the same regardless of their responses, things tend to get dominated by people who are there to do the bare minimum, and get paid.
My gut feeling is that it is far more likely for participants who do not take the survey seriously to report supporting those Republican candidates. After all, participants also live in the same world, and they bring in all sorts of baggage which this study does nothing to control.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...