This 2015 paper ought to provoke provoke an interesting discussion:
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Abstract
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.
What made me think of this was the following bit of pseudo-profound bullshit from FMM on New Year’s Day:
Fifth’s claim didn’t hold up very well, as you can see by following the link.
A related thread:
The reception or rejection of bullshit profoundly depends on whether we are trying to get to the truth without any bias; our willingness to accept the truth no matter what our views are…
Today, unfortunately, what we need remember is that FIRST there’s what people want to hear, there’s what people want to believe, there’s everything else, THEN there’s the truth!
So, people who are not willing to accept the truth are looking at the truth through their own filters (I call them the truth suppressors) in order to maintain their own views…
In other words, people who view the truth through their own filters prefer bullshit over the truth because the truth means responsibility which is why everyone (the lover of lies) dreads it…
Could this maybe be inserted in the OP as a kind of motto?
😉
Further on the reception or rejection of bullshit…
As examples, let’s review 2 fundamental world views on the existence of the universe and life…
1. It is the truth that the universe had a begging some 14 billion years ago and it began highly organized…
These truths have profound implications, if you are not bias…If the universe had a beginning, what caused its beginning? If the universe began highly organized, what organized it? We could continue with the fine tuned expansion and acceleration of the universe; what fine tuned it? Where is the energy coming from for the acceleration of the universe?
2. The truth about the origins of life on earth is that life only comes from life…nobody, no experiment has ever shown that life can come from lifeless matter…
This truth has profound implications, if you are not bias…If life only comes from life, what was the original source of life? Did the first life on earth start “as a simple life form” and then evolved into more complex? If it did, where did the genes come from for the suppose process of endosymbiosis, so that prokaryotic cells could evolve into eukaryotic? We could continue with many, many other issues that show the truth that life couldn’t have originated by ransom, natural processes…
But all the above is not the point I want to make right now…
The point I’m trying to make is:
If you are not bias, the logical answers to the above question are obvious…
But if you prefer bullshit over the truth, then you look for bullshitters to provide you with what you are looking for, and today, there is a rich buffet of different kinds of bullshit to satisfy your needs; “…first what want to hear, then what want to believe, then everything else …”AS LONG AS IT IS NOT THE TRUTH…
J-Mac,
What kind of a “mental health worker” are you, exactly, J-Mac?
J-Mac,
Well, at least what you wrote isn’t pseudo-profound.
Glen Davidson
For a while linguists debated whether a sentence like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is grammatical or not. Basically, what’s at dispute is weather the term “grammar” includes semantics or stops at syntax. Battle lines were drawn. I belong to the camp that holds that semantics is part of grammar, as semantics is inseparable from the nature of language and grammar should mean an exhaustive overview of the nature of a language.
In the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” it’s the semantic contradictions that raise doubts about grammatical soundness. The first of OP examples, “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” raises similar doubts.
Incoherent or illogical statements should be easy to dismiss. Hopefully the full article shows that pseudo-profoundness involves more than mere incoherence of select awesome words.
Some people may be attracted to pseudo-profoundness while others are attracted to scientistic nonsense: Add some numbers and other vivid imaginary details and it becomes necessarily true. Provably scientology is a good example how to employ the full range of bullshit very effectively.
You just said life only comes from life. Then life must have always existed, for an eternity.
Either it is true or it is not, that life only comes from life. If it’s true, life must have existed eternally. If it isn’t, then your entire line of reasoning collapses. There must be an exception or life must have ALWAYS existed. Because as you said, life only comes from life. You see the problem right?
Besides, this line of reasoning commits the fallacy of exclusion. It violates the inductive principle of total evidence. The specific truth is that all life is cellular life made of atoms and molecules, and all living cells through the process of cell division, come from other living cells made of atoms and molecules. Where does this leave us? With an infinite regression of cell divisions.
But there can’t have been an infinite regression of cell divisions, so the principle must be false. It simply can’t be true that all cells originate through cell division. It must be possible for the to originate in some other way.
There isn’t any way to get from “cells only come from cell division” to “God made life”. The former doesn’t lead to, or even imply, the latter.
Erik:
No, because unlike the first, the latter does not involve obvious contradictions.
The authors aim for vacuousness, not incoherence, in their examples of pseudo-profound bullshit.
Yes, there’s a wide spectrum of bullshit and bullshitting techniques. The authors note:
The example I provided from FMM is neither vacuous nor incoherent:
It’s just wrong, and the pseudo-profundity is an attempt to distract from the obvious wrongness.
walto,
Does it matter? Really?
walto,
Does it matter? Really?
GlenDavidson,
Elaborate please! I’m just curious…
I admire your passion…
My favorite result from the paper:
And what’s probably the money quote, from the Discussion section:
Well, you’re the one who keeps bringing it up. And if you’re actually in the biz, you might know that there’s a difference between being a psychiatrist and cleaning the floors in a mental hospital.
Rumraket,
This is a straw-man argument. His argument is not that cells came from cell division. It is that life only comes from life. This statement is supported by the current evidence and yes that evidence supports that life comes from cell division.
The origin of life is unknown as is the origin of electro magnetism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
I think you have the infinite regression issue well articulated. As Aquinas claims, to avoid infinite regression of causes you need the existence of an uncaused cause.
And the evidence is that language exists by being learned by each generation of humans from other humans. That doesn’t indicate that language never arose from non-language precursors, let alone that it arose by magic.
Why don’t you ever deal properly with evidence? Oh I know, you have your answer and only it will be allowed your consideration.
Yeah, not really. We have some evidence for non-magic abiogenesis, none for your magic “answer.”
Certainly no reason to presuppose an infinite regression of causes with respect to life. That is a strawman.
Glen Davidson
The contradictions are obvious to me. You must have a different system of semantics. Or maybe no system at all. Since you will most likely never reveal it, we can drop this point right here.
It’s obviously wrong only given your flat understanding of truth, which can be itself demonstrated wrong as soon as you lay it out properly. But you won’t do that, so we can drop this point also right here.
Anyway, an interesting article and a fairly rigorous and nuanced definition of bullshit they have there. One dubious thing I found though – it covertly presumes that pseudo-profound bullshit only occurs when people deviate from naturalistic mindset. First, the authors (rightly) comprehend the distinction of material and immaterial, section 4.2 Ontological confusions
Leaving aside what spiritual healing really is, the distinction of immaterial and material is correct and important here. But next they say this, section 4.3 Epistemically suspect beliefs
Well, it doesn’t conflict. Angels are not such folk-mechanical kinds of things even on the folksiest of beliefs. So this is not a good example of an epistemically suspect belief. This slip could have been avoided if the authors had some better fleshed-out ontology of the immaterial. Other than this bias towards naturalism, it’s a well done study.
More tomorrow, but I can’t resist commenting on this:
keiths:
Erik:
Please share your full-bodied definition of truth with us, by which fifth’s statement is transformed into something other than pseudo-profound bullshit.
Your OP. You first.
No, it’s not a strawman, it’s a correction. When you correct someone, you are not strawmanning them, you are inviting them to stop making an error.
If he had said 3+2=4, and if had responded “No, 3+2=5”, I’m not making a strawman of what he said, I’m correcting a mistake.
The fact that “life only comes from life” actually really means “cells only come from cell division” means he’s not accurately reporting what is the true fact of the matter. When he says “life”, what he refers to is “cells”.
He wants to imply (even if he doesn’t know it, he has to, since that is the only way his inductive argument could work) “life” is somehow more than just cells. That there is some vitalistic force to “being alive”, that is wholly apart from the chemical and physical constituents and processes that cells undergo and are made of.
And that this vitalistic force is what only comes from another vitalistic force and so on, until he gets to “the first vitalistic force”, which he obviously thinks is God. Only by deliberately ignoring the physical basis of life, that they are made of cells, which are made of atoms and molecules undergoing physical and chemical processes, does his inductive argument work.
Thereby, the argument commits a fallacy in inductive logic, called the fallacy of exclusion. Because it excludes important facts about what “life” is, and that evidence once included (thereby, when included, makes the argument honest and non-fallacious), alters the conclusion. Instead what you end up with, is that “life” must come from atoms and molecules. That’s it, that’s how far that argument can take you when you correctly and honestly include all the known facts about life.
The “life only comes from life” argument is therefore, I’m sorry to report to those of you who are infatuated with it, logically fallacious. There may be a way to argue for God, but this isn’t the argument that does it. Move on, find different and better arguments.
Yes calling my statement pseudo-profound BS is just empty bluster unless he explains specifically why it’s false or vacuous.
He can’t so he doesn’t
peace
Is the uncaused cause alive?
Your problem is that you are assuming that life can only come from life. If that were the case then there is an infinite regress problem. If life can come from natural physical and chemical processes, there is no infinite regress.
Erik,
You were hoping I wouldn’t call your bluff?
I hold to a correspondence theory of truth, under which fifth’s inane statement…
…is true if in fact every piece of true information, when properly understood contains within it all truth.
I explained why fifth’s statement was wrong right after he made it:
fifth:
What’s beautiful about this is that it demonstrates Erik’s own susceptibility to pseudo-profound bullshit.
Fifth produced it and Erik is lapping it up.
Asserting something is not the same as demonstrating it
we have been over this
The person who wants the Metallica album did babysit James Hetfield when he was a boy if she is grandma. Here experiences are part of what makes her her. Data is not discrete and every piece of information is related to every other in some way.
That is why I included the phrase “when properly understood”. In order to properly understand who grandma is you need to know who she babysat back in the day.
Just because you might learn stuff in bits and pieces does not mean that truth is disjoined and disjunct.
You are confusing the universe as you come to know it with the universe as it is. How quaint
peace
Well, you’re the one who keeps bringing it up.And if you’re actually in the biz, you might know that there’s a difference between being a psychiatrist and cleaning the floors in a mental hospital.
keiths,
Yet this never seems to clue you in to the fact of evolution.
Of course the current reproduction of life intrinsically indicates nothing about its origin, but the evidence indeed suggests that, at least since near the beginning of life, imperfect reproduction is about all that has happened to keep life going and adapting to the conditions. Somehow, that this points to evolution–as does the overall mass of biologic data–is missed by you, while you try to make the reproduction of life somehow an argument against non-magic abiogenesis.
That life comes from life should tell you something, indeed. It is not being manufactured, it is not being designed, it is in fact reproducing imperfectly and being “selected.” That’s what you and J-Mac claim (sans the obvious evolutionary aspect, according to your biases), yet you won’t admit that therefore the evidence is for evolution.
You do have a point, it’s just moot with respect to the origin of life, while it is certainly a point in favor of evolution.
Glen Davidson
fifth,
You meet a stranger named Isabel on the train. You casually mention to her, truthfully, that Grandma wants a Metallica album for Christmas. That’s all you tell her.
What does Isabel now know? That Grandma wants a Metallica album, obviously. Does she know that Grandma babysat James Hetfield when he was a boy? No, because that bit of truth was not included in the piece of information you passed to her.
It’s so obvious that even a rather dim child could grasp it. Your statement is incorrect:
It’s pseudo-profound bullshit.
Fifth might say without the grounding of his presupposition Isabel cannot know anything, for her to know anything revelation is required.So all truth has the same source . Therefore this revelatory source when properly understood based on his presupposition contains within it all truth.
It does not mean the the truth is not disjointed or disjunct either.
Well, that sounds pseudo-profound.
And that other thing.
Glen Davidson
So–what kind are you?
newton,
That wouldn’t help his case. He didn’t say this:
He did say this:
His claim is false. Isabel received a piece of true information from fifth, and that piece of true information obviously did not contain within it all truth.
Rumraket,
He has made a general argument which is that life only comes from life. As you admit above life may be more then just an arrangement of atoms and molecules. Since his argument was general it may include all the elements you mention. A straw-man is often created by changing a general argument to a more specific one as you have done here. Can you refute his argument without changing his words?
Patrick,
If life comes solely from atoms and molecules you then ask the question what caused the atoms and molecules and your infinite regress is again initiated. 🙂
newton,
Excellent question 🙂 I think we need a definition of alive.
GlenDavidson,
Can you support the claim that Darwinian evolution is a fact.
Oh I definitely agree,
I’m not claiming that truth is not disjointed or disjunct I presuppose it.
When I do so it enables me to do other things like assume induction is valid and that logic applies universally.
I do think that there are hints that knowledge and truth work like I presuppose they do.
check this out..It is well worth the time
peace
Can you respond to the actual point, rather than repeat your dull cant?
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
You are making assertions and not arguments. There is no evidence for Darwinian evolution here. There is only evidence of in-species common ancestry. That is what we are observing. The rest you are extrapolating based on your bias.
It’s your “argument,” which points out that life comes from life. What you’re incapable of doing is recognizing that this means that there’s no magic intervening (no evidence for it anyway), no design occurring, no manufacture. So what leads to changes in life? The only mechanism you’re allowing is (imperfect) reproduction, hence evolution. I know that you won’t accept your own logic, but that it’s pathetic is obvious.
There wasn’t meant to be. You’ve ignored all of the evidence thus far, in furtherance of an idea that lacks any good evidence, so there’s no point in bringing up the evidence again. The desire would be for you to accept the logic of your own claims, although it’s clear that you won’t. Given that, it’s to point out how illogical IDists such as you are in supporting your ideas that lack meaningful evidence.
Oh, you mean all of the similarities within species indicates common ancestry? But beyond that it doesn’t, despite the patterns being what must come from derivative branching? Please explain that meaningfully.
No, it’s using evidence consistently. Which a prejudiced person like yourself consistently fails to do. As your response shows yet again.
Glen Davidson
If fifth holds to any other theory of truth and it’s a sound theory, it changes the way you should look at the statement.
Erik:
Hence my request:
It needs to fit the definition of “life” in the claim ,life can only come from life.
And she knew it was true because fifth believed it to be true or because you are stipulating it is true?
newton.
I didn’t say she knew it was true. I said this:
In any case, whether she knew it was true is irrelevant to fifth’s claim, which was:
The piece of true information that he passed to Isabel — that Grandma wants a Metallica album for Christmas — does not contain within it all truth, which would include the size of the Andromeda galaxy and the number of concubines bedded by Genghis Khan. It’s frikkin’ obvious.
Fifth was bullshitting, and Erik bought it hook, line, and sinker.