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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong
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It works similarly for psychology. People who study psychology learn dozen different explanations of human thinking and behavior, so the smarter among them know these things are far from settled, and perhaps there is no simple answer that explains everything. On the other hand, some people just read a random book on psychology, and they believe they understand everything completely.
Or don't read any books and simply pick it up by osmosis.
The same is broadly true of e.g. pop music or politics: you can't really escape them. It's not necessarily a reason to study them, though.
This seems true. What I am curious about is whether it remains true if you substitute "don't" with "do". Those that do study philosophy have not on average impressed me with their ability to discriminate among the bullshit.
it seems to me that you are identifying 'study philosophy' as 'take philosophy courses/study academic philosophy/etc', which may not have been the intent of the OP
Won't be as able to be selective, maybe, although many here would argue that studying philosophy will decrease the quality of your bullshit meter rather than improve it.
I think that is most definitely false, because many of the the ideas in philosophy contradict each other, and you get good exposure to contradictory good looking arguments, which teaches you to question such arguments in general.
Popular science books, on the other hand, often tend to explain true conclusions using fallacious arguments.
To steel-man somervta's point, it might be that philosophy decreases the quality of your bullshit meter by making it overactive. I don't find it plausible that philosophy generally makes people hyper-credulous, but I could buy that it generally makes people hyperskeptical, quibbling, self-undermining, and/or directionless.