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Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

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Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#161

Post by mcphage »

wavefunction wrote: post #155
kjeetgill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right of course but you get what they _mean_ right? Persistence can be key to accomplishing something significant you don't feel capable of. Or am I being too charitable?

That specific example seems more like some combination of persistence and power is required: great power suddenly and temporarily expressed could cut through stone while a weak power expressed over a long-enough time frame would have the same effect. On it's face it's only a partially true statement and thus is effectively 'BS' when presented as an aphorism. As well, it anthropormorphizes the effect of gravity on wat…

> It might serve as a fine metaphor for human persistence but that's all.

That's what it's intended to do. It's not trying to be a statement about Geology.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#162

Post by everybodyknows »

duopixel wrote: post #19

A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions). * 1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence. 2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty. 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seek…

Copy of the questions above contains several typos that alter the meaning of the questions.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#163

Post by foldr »

mcphage wrote: post #160
foldr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As malloryerik said in another comment, that seems to be confusing the cause of the pain with the pain itself. The paranoiac's pain is real, even if the cause is imaginary.

> The paranoiac's pain is real, even if the cause is imaginary. That's exactly the point of the sentence.

No, the sentence talks about imaginary pain, not real pain with imaginary causes.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#164

Post by JdeBP »

foldr wrote: post #146
JdeBP wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a definition of bullshit given in the paper. It does not relate to whether the statement is true or false (indeed quite the converse, it relating to an absence of concern with truth) and it does relate to whether the statement consistently has an unambiguous meaning. Consider that you understood the statement without complaint of ambiguity, enough to question the truth of the assertion and discuss that with o…

I said that I'm ok with calling it "not bullshit", so I'm not sure what you're getting at. I was questioning whether or not it could properly be called profound.

On the contrary, you've spent almost every post in this sub-thread questioning whether it is true.

To question whether it should properly be called profound would be, conversely, to question the paper's methodology. There is, as I said, a definition of bullshit. There is no equivalent definition of profundity. Nor were test subjects asked to evaluate the sentences with an explicit profundity criterion. The so-called profoundness-receptivity metric was actually a measurement of bullshit-receptivity of non-bullshit statements.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#165

Post by throwaway080383 »

raverbashing wrote: post #93
peteretep wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Also: > 2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty. Describes reading the description of an artwork at a Modern Art gallery pretty well

Abstract beauty can be beautiful without having a hidden meaning (or at least each one will see "the beauty they can see") Show white noise to an Imagenet CNN and it will give you a score for something.

To describe it as a "beauty" means it is beautiful by definition. The point is that it undergoes a transformation in your head upon some deeper meaning being revealed.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#166

Post by SamBam »

foldr wrote: post #163
mcphage wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paranoiac's pain is real, even if the cause is imaginary. That's exactly the point of the sentence.

No, the sentence talks about imaginary pain, not real pain with imaginary causes.

But pain is subjective by definition. What does "imaginary pain" mean? The answer can only include some notion of "cause."

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#167

Post by throwaway080383 »

sophistication wrote: post #106
duopixel wrote: post #19

A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions). * 1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence. 2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty. 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seek…

The only sentence that confused me is this one: > 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person. I'm not a native English speaker, so I might be wrong, but I'm reading this as "the future will more likely reveal the truth to those who are open-minded" which seems to be too profound to be bullshit. Of course, "irrational fact" is an awkward way to refer to false beliefs, but awkwardness≠bullshit.

Yeah I only labeled it as bs because "irrational fact" makes no sense.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#168

Post by SamBam »

pixl97 wrote: post #131
duopixel wrote: post #19

A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions). * 1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence. 2. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty. 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seek…

>1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence. This one annoys me, because of it's ether/or proposition when it is more of a and/or function. Yes, water including rivers cuts through rocks in more than one way. For example, Ph differences in the water can cause chemical weathering of the rock. In general these effects happen slowly and need to be persistent for any measurable effect.…

That seems to be entirely missing the point that it's a metaphor.

It's like taking issue with another of the profound statements: "Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in."

"Well, no," you point out, "you could be carried in by the teacher. Or maybe you're in a wheelchair and you need to wheel in."

The door, and stepping, in this case, are to be understood metaphorically. So is the river and the rock.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#169

Post by xg15 »

c3534l wrote: post #86

I don't know if they mention it in the article, but those BS quotes are eerily similar to those generated by http://wisdomofchopra.com/ and I think that might have been what they used.

There might be a reason for that. I think a lot the "bullshitness" of the sentences comes from the way the individual words do have meaning - however, the combinations of words used do not have an unambiguous meaning.

E.g., you know what an observation is, what "universal" means and what a transformation is - but it's far less clear what an "universal observation" is or what it means if one is transformed.

If this were a programming language, the sentences would produce valid ASTs but would be riddled with type errors.

I think output from markov chains or other generators have the same property: They easily produce valid individual words and correct grammatical structures but they don't care at all that those structures don't have a well-defined higher-level meaning.

Couriously though, we seem to validate a sentence mostly on those lower levels - which has the effect that you might not realize a sentence has no meaning but just have a vague feeling of not understanding it.

The effect also reminds me of some badly-writtem math papers, where an auther uses a familiar notation from one domain and applies it to objects of a different domain without clearly defining what he wants to do. It can take surprisingly long until you even realize you have no idea what it means.

Re: Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior

#170

Post by dropit_sphere »

amelius wrote: post #71

Is this related to "shit tests" (see link)? https://www.quora.com/What-are-common-shit-tests-The-term-sh...

No.

"Shit tests" in the most common usage, refer to doing provocative things to throw someone off their stride and see how unflappable they are.

The paper is about sentences that don't really mean anything, but carry some (false) markers of profundity.

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