Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153419

by ageofwant • 10 years ago

148 110 10 years ago

journals.plos.org

blowski3• 10 years ago

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

samirillian• 10 years ago

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

danielweber• 10 years ago

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

tomp3• 10 years ago

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

1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.

2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.

3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.

4. The future explains irrational facts.

5. Imagination is inside exponential space time events.

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

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

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

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

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

(I definitely fall prey to 4.)

Some additional commentary (from [2]):

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

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

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

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

raverbashing4• 10 years ago

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

An important question, certainly.

shoo• 10 years ago

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).

venomsnake2• 10 years ago

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)

venomsnake2• 10 years ago

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.

DanBC• 10 years ago

I too fall victim to 4.

Put these in a nice image macro and I can imagine my facebook friends sharing on them their walls.

10, especially.

tomp3• 10 years ago

10 is very Zen.

jonnathanson2• 10 years ago

Statement #4 kinda sorta starts to sound deep if you let your guard down. I'd argue it's the strongest bullshit in the lot.

That said, I LMAO'd over #9.

verytrivial• 10 years ago

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).

xg15• 10 years ago

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.

logicallee5• 10 years ago

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

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

1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.

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

2. Good health imparts reality to subtle creativity.

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

3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

    Score:

    8/10 
    7/10
    0/10
    12/10
    0/10
    1/10
    3/10
    9/10
    0/10
    0/10

    Average score:
    --------------
    4/10

So, I've seen worse.

coldtea2• 10 years ago

and have the energy to actually make something you're thinking about a reality.

"Imparts reality" is not the same as realization -- it's more like "instills reality" (shows "subtle creativity" what's real).

jflatow• 10 years ago

Perhaps it just means you are 40% aligned with the nexus of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism

blowski3• 10 years ago

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.

lake99• 10 years ago

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.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC5• 10 years ago

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).

iamcurious2• 10 years ago

Plants do have joy.

Have you ever watched an Orange Tree blooming?

metaphorm3• 10 years ago

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.

solipsism• 10 years ago

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.

paulajohnson• 10 years ago

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.

iamcurious2• 10 years ago

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.

raverbashing4• 10 years ago

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)

pavlov3• 10 years ago

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

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

mac01021• 10 years ago

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.

humanrebar2• 10 years ago

Trump is not exactly a bullshitter, and that seems to be a major component of his appeal.

The Trump University lawsuits are accusing Trump of fraud, which sounds exactly like bullshit to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University

runn1ng• 10 years ago

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

zerotimer• 10 years ago

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

I will post the conclusion here which is rather funny:

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

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

reednj• 10 years ago

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

blowski3• 10 years ago

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

Atwood• 10 years ago

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

logicallee5• 10 years ago

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

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

_delirium• 10 years ago

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.

return04• 10 years ago

Apparently they took "High Bullshit Receptivity Scale statements" , and shortened it to "bullshit" , which is disingenuous.

http://search.proquest.com/openview/147f47b65818b1c2cdfca9c0...

mseebach• 10 years ago

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

That's bound to be a representative sample.

tinco4• 10 years ago

Why would it not be?

78666cdc• 10 years ago

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

wbillingsley3• 10 years ago

Even the article says it isn't.

"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.

Tloewald• 10 years ago

It's at least as representative as the 40-50 college freshmen that are used for most such studies.

dkopi• 10 years ago

"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.

sfifs• 10 years ago

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.

wbillingsley3• 10 years ago

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"

notahacker2• 10 years ago

My favourite Onion-worthy line from the article was "research on bullshit is still in its infancy".

tommorris• 10 years ago

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

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

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

algorias• 10 years ago

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!

raverbashing4• 10 years ago

"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"

From the article itself

return04• 10 years ago

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

JasonSage• 10 years ago

What title would you use instead?

return04• 10 years ago

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

thaw135792• 10 years ago

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

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

https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar

humanrebar2• 10 years ago

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University

thaw135792• 10 years ago

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...

mikehall314• 10 years ago

The original source for the pseudo-profound bullshit seems to be http://wisdomofchopra.com/

shiftoutbox• 10 years ago

This is deep

jkldotio• 10 years ago

Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.

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

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

[0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...

[1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amaz...

mistermann• 10 years ago

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

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

[5] leads to:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909... 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.

xmlblog• 10 years ago

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

(emphasis mine)

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

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

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

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

NoGravitas• 10 years ago

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

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

The LBRP is reputed to be good.

hellofunk• 10 years ago

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

DonHopkins2• 10 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

Lxr• 10 years ago

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.

guscost• 10 years ago

This is a classic psychology journal ad-hominem:

https://guscost.com/2016/03/31/the-psychology-journal-ad-hom...

mjpuser• 10 years ago

Jason Silva is bullshit.

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

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

alva• 10 years ago

My life is slightly worse having watched those videos

nanis• 10 years ago

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.

randogp• 10 years ago

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

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Ad...

massysett• 10 years ago

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

eggman• 10 years ago

perspective is crucial; this conflict will continue

dspeyer• 10 years ago

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

squozzer• 10 years ago

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

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

siegecraft• 10 years ago

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

billhendricksjr• 10 years ago

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

newesthn2• 10 years ago

This is a correlation Bullshit study.

newesthn2• 10 years ago

This is a correlation study on Bullshit.

ghufran_syed• 10 years ago

Alternative hypotheses regarding the 'misperceiving [random] statements as profound ' group: maybe the group is: 1) more polite? 2) more efficient? (less time wasted on the task - more money per unit time) 3) more fond of poetry? 4) more religious? I think this last would be an interesting hypothesis to test, but like the authors, I have NO evidence that would support any of these hypotheses. However, unlike the authors, it appears I recognize that there is a lack of evidence :)

Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound

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