You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Lumifer comments on Open thread, Nov. 30 - Dec. 06, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 30 November 2015 08:05AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (104)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (104)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 November 2015 07:33:02PM 14 points [-]

A paper.

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.

Comment author: Soothsilver 30 November 2015 09:23:56PM 6 points [-]

I liked this part:

"Participants were also given an attention check. For this, 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 (N = 99). However, the results were similar if these participants were excluded. We therefore retained the full data set."

Comment author: VincentYu 01 December 2015 03:52:24AM *  4 points [-]

Nice paper.

p. 558 (Study 4):

Participants also completed a ten item personality scale (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003) [the TIPI; an alternative is Rammstedt and John's BFI-10] that indexes individual differences in the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness). These data will not be considered further.

It's strange not to say why the data will not be considered further. The data are available, the reduction is clean, but the keys look a bit too skeletal given that copies of the orignal surveys don't seem to be available (perhaps because Raven's APM and possibly some other scales are copyrighted). Still, it's great of the journal and the authors to provide the data. Anyway, I'll take a look.

The supplement contains the statements and the corresponding descriptive statistics for their profundity ratings. It's an entertaining read.

ETA: For additional doses of profundity, use Armok_GoB's profound LW wisdom generator.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit