BlaBlaMeter detects how much bullshit is in your text

I'd guess so. Or maybe they compiled a corpus of bullshit text (scientific articles, PR and political texts), created a little statistical model and are using that to check the level of bullshit of your text.

shanelja2• 14 years ago

Most unusual...

"Politics are great, come buy our new, brand spanking awesome banana phone, apple, steve jobs, cripplingly epic banana phone. Just great phones, with bananas, no apples to be found here. Samsung can suck on our banana phone. Android is better than iOS."

"Your text: 251 characters, 43 words Bullshit Index :0.03 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English."

DallaRosa3• 14 years ago

You wrote a lot of bullshit but your text looks pretty normal from a vocabulary standard. looking a bit more to the website you'll see that what it calls bullshit english is that pattern often used in scientific articles or law texts (and president speeches) where they seem to be saying a lot of really wow stuff but all you're really left in the end as a big "?" cause you couldn't get half of what the person said.

slashcom3• 14 years ago

Here's a few things I've gleamed from experimenting with it:

- It uses a unigram language model. You can take the same text, randomly permute the words, and you get the same score. This means it also can't be using things like POS tagging, phrases, etc.

- It normalizes words by making all letters lowercase. The exact same text in all upper case has the same score.

- The score is eventually normalized by the length of the text. The same text copied multiple times gets the same score.

- It does not form a valid probability distribution, as someone's managed to get some 1.16's. This makes me believe it's not a Naive Bayes classifier giving you the P(Bullshit|Text). Though this is what I originally thought it would be.

icegreentea2• 14 years ago

It is that simple. Looks like they assign a BS level to words, and then take some sort of average bullshit level amongst all words. Word order doesn't matter as slashcom says.

For example, if you take the score from the Oracle Pricing blurb posted by BitMistro, and change 'strategies' to 'goals', you drop down to 0.8 or so. If you add an extra random 'strategy' somewhere, it bumps up to 1.4 or something.

I actually suspect a bug on their pair for strategies... probably a decimal error when building to BS level tables.

But similar things happen with other 'bullshity' words, just to a lesser degree.

slashcom3• 14 years ago

It should also be noted that on about 400 short texts (~300 words each), it did not correlate with the Flesh-Kinaid readability measure at all. So it's not measuring something like average word length or syllable counts.

But it's not QUITE a true lexicon, as it handles Out-Of-Vocabulary words quite strangely. If you use as input text:

"PR-Experts, politicians, ad writers or scientists need to be strong here! BlaBlaMeter unmasks without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text. A useful tool for everyone involved in writing! Simply copy your text into the white field and check your writing style. It works with english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off). For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences."

Then you get 0.16. If you replace the last word 'sentences' with 'strategy' you go up to 0.44. However, if you change the last word to 'sentstrategyences' you get 0.47. Try it: you can basically insert 'strategy' inside ANY word and really raise your score. Actually, if you just insert "strateg" anywhere inside the text, it goes up massively.

So I actually think it's just doing string search counts over a lexicon.

throwaway19792• 14 years ago

Hilarious! I plugged in some paragraphs from press releases and it was spot on. I also appreciated the "or Scientist" part ... simply awesome!

"Bullshit Index :0.64 This reeks. I bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone."

impendia• 14 years ago

Scientist?

I put in a page or so from a scientific paper I recently wrote and got 0.19.

sp332• 14 years ago

You have the causality backwards.

throwaway19792• 14 years ago

Heh .. try putting in the first para from a scientific paper. I bet 10 karma points that this will have higher BS content than the rest. Similarly, the last para of the intro is also almost always content free.

Note: I'm a scientist too ... good to poke fun at ourselves, eh? :)

slantyyz3• 14 years ago

It would be neat if someone integrated algorithms like this into discussion forum software.

flexie• 14 years ago

I tried with Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC. Here's what it said:

Your text: 15000 characters, 2645 words Bullshit Index :0.13 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English.

Does that mean the algorithms work?

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Obamas AMA answers came out between 0.10 and 0.30! http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama

fwr• 14 years ago

That's the first thing I've checked, I'm a little disappointed.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

Holy Cr*p - The President actually did an AMA. I cannot imagine our Prime Minister replying to an email.

Edit: oh its happening today - I thought it was old news and no-one had told me. Apologies for the exclamation marks now gone.

droob• 14 years ago

Good companion to Paul Ford's Passivator: http://www.ftrain.com/ThePassivator.html

mikle• 14 years ago

My blog posts (http://sveder.com/blog) are between .18-.22 so I feel relieved. Great idea, and like everyone else I'd like to know where I fail too.

grabeh• 14 years ago

The main reason I posted was in the hope of triggering discussion over the method used to analyse the text.

I've seen users getting a lower score simply by separating out a block of text into numbered paragraphs which would seem to point to quite a simplistic method.

http://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/cutting-down-on-t...

DallaRosa3• 14 years ago

I'll withstand my statement: model based on a corpus of PR, scholar, licenses and the like texts. If they are into real statistical NLP.

Or just esthetic rules + word dictionary.

slashcom3• 14 years ago

If I were to make the software, the corpus of PR, licenses, etc. would be the way I go. But "they did it statistically" doesn't answer the question "what is the model?" There are many different statistical models one could use. My other post has a few things we've figured out.

But I'm starting to think a rule-based lexicon isn't out of the question, given these >1 scores on some texts.

primitur• 14 years ago

I'd like to use it as a plugin for email, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and other such things of that nature .. ;)

BitMastro• 14 years ago

I got an astonishing 1.13 from http://www.oracle.com/uk/corporate/pricing/index.html :D

shell0x• 14 years ago

I tried the german version of it and pasted a SAP article, which got a score of 1.34. They mostly talk bullshit, but the article wasn't bad to understand imho, so I think the algorithm needs some work.

The text was:

"Möchten Sie SAP-Software vor Ort installieren oder über die Cloud darauf zugreifen? Wir bieten in jedem Fall umfassende Services, zugeschnitten auf Ihre individuellen Anforderungen. Wir verfügen über eines der größten Expertenteams weltweit. Unsere qualifizierten Mitarbeiter beraten Sie gern bei der Konzeptionierung, Implementierung und Optimierung Ihrer Systemlandschaft. Profitieren Sie innerhalb kürzester Zeit von Ihrer SAP-Lösung."

BCM43• 14 years ago

Heh, pasted in the benefits here: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/061863.html and got 1.26.

yskchu• 14 years ago

Tried Churchill's "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech; got 0.08 BS index; I think it works :)

derrida3• 14 years ago

Derrida, Chapter 2 'Of Grammatology'

>Bullshit Index :0.26 Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'

some indications ... I'd say this thing is broken.

makmanalp• 14 years ago

You're just bitter that that era of philosopher in general used an artificially complicated writing style, complete with invented terminology, that borders bullshit :)

derrida3• 14 years ago

I'm just pointing out it is broken.

Finnegan's Wake, Chapter 2, Book 1.

> Bullshit Index :0.11 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English.

definitely broken

Or perhaps it's a feature and it can pick out philosophical / artistic 'bullshit' from PR 'bullshit'.

Quote for people not familiar with 'Finnegan's Wake'

> And aroud the lawn the rann it rann and this is the rann that Hosty made. Spoken. Boyles and Cahills, Skerretts and Pritchards, viersefied and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney. Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him Mike, some dub him Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn. Some apt him Arth, some bapt him Barth, Coll, Noll, Soll, Will, Weel, Wall but I parse him Persse O'Reilly else he's called no name at all. To- gether. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty for he's the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king of all ranns. Have you here? (Some ha) Have we where? (Some hant) Have you hered? (Others do) Have we whered (Others dont) It's cumming, it's brumming! The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass crash. The(klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrotty- graddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot!)

hobbes• 14 years ago

I agree.

I tried some Hegel, who scored 0.18. Clearly broken.

Schopenhauer got it right, where BlaBlaMeter gets it wrong:

"If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus ... scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right."

dimasg• 14 years ago

That snippet scores 0.26

droithomme• 14 years ago

Try the following text, which I pulled from a brand management web site:

We help businesses increase profitability by helping develop a strategic market approach and communicate the right message.

Our approach is designed for those serious and committed to looking inward so they can connect outward for greater results in an expedient manner.

We analyze your business goals, assess your marketing needs to accomplish them, create a strategic plan and manage its implementation, leaving owners and managers to tend to other needs of their business.

Excerpt is cited as fair use, namely the educational value in evaluating a tool with three sentences of buzzword heavy english from a real site. Specific citation info omitted only so they won't be embarrassed, but may be found with Google.

lucaspiller• 14 years ago

I copied in a Daily Mail article and it only gave me 0.12. I think your algorithm needs work...

joelthelion• 14 years ago

It would be much better if it could highlight bullshit sections.

d4n3• 14 years ago

It would be even better if it replaced the bullshit sections with "bla bla".

slantyyz3• 14 years ago

I just pasted some text from a random TechCrunch article relating to Spotify and got this:

Your text: 847 characters, 145 words Bullshit Index :0.56 Something's fishy. Obviously you want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so: who would understand it?

tzaman3• 14 years ago

Apparently you're not the only one to try TechCrunch first - I did exactly the same thing after clicking the link.

It appears our internal bullshit meters work just fine as well :)

slantyyz3• 14 years ago

After that, I pasted in an excerpt from PandoDaily and it got a marginally higher score on the BS meter.

vignesh_vs_in• 14 years ago

I tried with my own blog post, good to know its not full of bullshit

nayanga• 14 years ago

"english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off)", did I read it as 15 characters ? Bullshit

donohoe• 14 years ago

Random articles:

  TechCrunch: 0.42 ("Amazon Wants Everyone To Know The Kindle Fire Is Sold Out")
  Paul Ryan's RNC speech: 0.14
  NYTimes: 0.11 ("Storm’s Winds Slow as It Exits Southern Louisiana")

Obviously its an apples and oranges comparison here but interesting (to me anyway) nonetheless

tzaman3• 14 years ago

Tried PG's Writing and speaking article. 0.1 bullshit index, which is almost zero :)

geogra4• 14 years ago

I used the Potsmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ )

And got scores of 0.35-0.45

kitsune_• 14 years ago

President's Obama's AMA answers score 0.21 (Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'-English, but is still within an acceptable range.)

nhebb• 14 years ago

I tried that too, along with Paul Ryan's speech (which got 0.14 - Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'). Then, I tried the copy on my landing page and got a 0.25. It's shameful to realize that I'm a bigger bullshitter than two politicians.

jbooth• 14 years ago

If you brazenly lie using strong phrases without any weasel words, it'll come across as not being 'bullshit' grammatically. I don't think the software has a fact checker.

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

I got 1.24 from Vmware: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/index.html

abarringer• 14 years ago

I just tried some text from one of our corporate announcements. Seems accurate.

0.8 This reeks. We bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone. Maybe you should spend less effort on trying to impress somebody.

vog• 14 years ago

Just for fun I ran quite a few Martin Fowler's articles through the BlaBlaMeter. On some of them, the "Bullshit Index" is unexpectedly large:

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html

> Bullshit Index: 0.31 – Your text shows indications of 'bullshit'-English. It's still ok for PR or advertising purposes, but more critical audiences may be skeptical.

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PhoenixServer.html

> Bullshit Index: 0.4 – Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

I'm writing a story; its a 0.12, acceptable.

skeltoac• 14 years ago

The text of the site itself scores a surprisingly low 0.14: "Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English."

This is not a useful tool because it does not define or point to the problems in the text.

brianjyee• 14 years ago

It would be nice if they gave even the smallest hint of what they're measuring.

ff0066mote2• 14 years ago

"I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow, drinking in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me."

---

Your text: 130 characters, 28 words Bullshit Index :0.05 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.

ff0066mote2• 14 years ago

I was simply demonstrating, as everyone else in this thread is, that the tool doesn't match one's intution of what is bullshit.

verisimilidude• 14 years ago

"I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow. I drink in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me."

---

Your text: 129 characters, 29 words Bullshit Index :0 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.

BlaBlaMeter prefers an extra word over a comma. Makes sense given the goal here.

atestu• 14 years ago

Maybe this plays a role:

> For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

My longest FAQ for HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768

got

"Your text: 8044 characters, 1160 words Bullshit Index :0.17 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English."

I too would like to know what the model is for the online ratings. Has there been a validation study of the model?

AFTER EDIT: Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

(which is the first writing of his that I ever read) appears to reach the maximum length (by character count) that the program will evaluate, and comes out like this:

"Your text: 15000 characters, 2698 words Bullshit Index :0.09 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English."

Maybe Paul's procedure of having friends look over his essays and give suggestions helps cut out the bullshit.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

I pasted in the Time Cube website and only got a 0.12.

kruffin• 14 years ago

It doesn't detect crazy; maybe it scores higher in one of the other corners of the cube.

bilbo0s• 14 years ago

Barack Obama's Inaugural: 0.18 Ryan's RNC Speech: 0.14

Lincoln (Gettysburg): 0.09 Lincoln (Second Inaugural): 0.09 MLK (I Have A Dream): 0.08 (Lowest of any Political text I tried) Someone else said Churchill got a 0.08, but I didn't actually try the unaltered text for myself.

BUT

John Donne: 0

finin• 14 years ago

I tried this on Paul Ryan's RNC address from last night, Barack Obama's innaugarel address, and a recent IEEE TKDE journal article. It gave bullshit measures of 0.15, 0.13 and 0.25, respectively. :-(

selectout• 14 years ago

Interesting to look at Privacy Policies in here. Google's policy had a slightly more bullshit leaning side than the average document.

thewarrior• 14 years ago

I think that this works by calculating something called the Gunning Fog index , ie the no. Of words in a sentence with more Syllables than usual .

mdlthree• 14 years ago

I tried past cover letters for jobs and they all scored in the 0.5-0.6 range. This makes sense since I AM trying to sell myself in an honest but tailored way. Does this reveal a flaw in my writing style or in the purpose of cover letters in the hiring process? Is it even possible for a cover letter to score low on a bullshit scale?

jschulenklopper• 14 years ago

Just tried to same with a recent cover letter, scoring 0.44. I wouldn't worry, although you (and me) can always try to bring it to a more down-to-earth level, making text easier and more pleasant to read. Unfortunately, a job application isn't the right domain for some scientific analysis on correlation between bullshit-measurements and interview invitations, if you're really interested in the job :-)

originalcvk• 14 years ago

"We use innovative cloud-based patent-pending technologies to leverage synergies between verticals. In order to facilitate the maximum return on investment, we hyperfocus on execution and delivery. We find our clients often fail to think outside the box, but with our proprietary technologies we help to identify action items that directly impact the bottom line."

Bullshit Index: 0.46 Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text.

Pretty good figuring it's under the 5 sentence recommendation.

shardling2• 14 years ago

Nice, the abstract to my thesis gets a 0.5[1]

The actual content parts hover around 0.16 (although I only tried segments without any equations). It makes me wonder what sort of results you'd get if you plotted this BS metric vs. page in a full length book.

  1. "You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to 
     impress somebody.  It still may be an acceptable result
     for a scientific text."

ColinWright• 14 years ago

Just thought I'd share:

    Your text: 2418 characters, 451 words
    Bullshit Index :0.05
    Your text shows no or marginal indications of
        'bullshit'-English.

instakill• 14 years ago

Best use case to test it with: http://startupista.com/corporate-bullshit-generator/

raesene2• 14 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to get it to higher than 0.5. I just tried it with some patent gibberish and it only made that score. --

"This project is a blue sky implementation of a cloud based virtual paradigm which really shifts the boundries of our connected world.

Using patent pending technology to accelerate your business, we use full-stack web-scale systems built on noSQL databases to drive clicks.

And your security is safe with us. We use military grade encryption to protect all your data at rest."

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Top story 'Amit on Grids' as I write this scored a .69 on the first paragraph.

egypturnash2• 14 years ago

I tried it on the front page of Time Cube.

  Bullshit Index :0.12
  Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English.

I get the feeling this tool is only testing for a very narrow definition of bullshit.

AllTheThings• 14 years ago

Joel on Software's "Software Inventory"[1] gets a 0.22 rating. I'm a big fan of Joel on Software and am curious as to how this model evaluates "bullshit".

1. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html

clwoodson• 14 years ago

Whatever algorithm it uses thinks George W Bush and Sarah Palin lace their speeches with less bullshit than Winston Churchill.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

Meta index: the page itself has 0.14 bulshit index...

kephra• 14 years ago

It would be nice, if http://www.blablameter.de/fragen_und_antworten.html is also available in English.

The result is that non-German speakers are standing in the dark, wondering what methodology is behind that software.

It might be even difficult to translate the concept to English, as some terms and ideas like http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalstil are missing in the (restricted) English language. German is so much more elaborated, its a language of philosophers ;-)

haeikou2• 14 years ago

* What's a good BlaBla Meter result?

High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3

* Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0?

This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits.

* What is the highest index value?

Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even.

* Does Google use a similar algorithm?

We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values.

* How does BlaBla Meter work?

BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;)

[1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject.

* Why does my scientific text have such a high index?

Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue.

* My mindless text gets a good score, why?

BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise.

* My text is wrongly devalued!

As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices.

* But humans read texts completely differently ...

When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't!

* What happens with entered texts?

Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.

arielweisberg• 14 years ago

One of my blog posts got a .16 so you have my seal of approval ;-)

001sky2• 14 years ago

How did Reddit's AMA do? NOT BAD!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451328 - full text http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451586 - summary text

  4. Small-Business tax breaks - [major bullshit] 0.5 [a]
  1. Space Race - [PR level bullshit] 0.33
  7. Money in Politics - [Some bullshit] 0.28
  2. Internet Freedom - [some bullshit] 0.23
  10. Work/Life Balance - [little bullshit] 0.16
  9. Jobs / recent grads - [little bullshit] 0.16
  6. Most Difficult Decision/afghanistan - [No Bullshit] 0.07

  [Un-analyzable]

  3. Favorite Basketball Player - too short
  8. White House Beer Recipe - too short
  5. First Activity on Nov 7 - too short

 [a]"Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so:
     who would understand it?"

BlaBlaMeter detects how much bullshit is in your text

Related Stories