An excellent addition to The Literature, and to the board. I bought the book and will link to this from the Starrett thread.
Starting Strength Coach
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Rip,
If this hasn't already come across your radar, I suspect you will enjoy this. There are many gems to be had in this paper.
http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
Have you read Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow?
TMPHBITEU
An excellent addition to The Literature, and to the board. I bought the book and will link to this from the Starrett thread.
Member
Frankfurt's On Bullshit is a prized jewel in my library. It's diminutive size and low page count is wonderfully apropos its thesis.
Member
I nearly did my PhD with Fugelsang, worlds collide.
Starting Strength Coach
While we're on the topics of rationality and cognitive biases and heuristics, ya'll may be interested in what is effectively the rationality encyclopedia: lesswrong.com
Eliezer recently re-compiled and edited the sequences into an e-book and a slowly being released across 6 volumes audiobook called, Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
Less Wrong is one of the best corners of the internet... including StartingStrength.com, of course.
✓ Member
This is awesome, thanks for the link! I'm currently finishing up a big article for SS.com on this exact topic (in the context of our industry) that will hopefully be released soon.
Edit: That was one of the most amusing papers I've ever read.
Last edited by Austin Baraki; 12-17-2015 at 05:07 PM.
Starting Strength Coach
Me too! But it looks like you may beat me to the punch.Originally Posted by Austin Baraki
Member
As somebody who does this with most things they hear and read, I wasn't aware that most people don't do this. Does that make me dumb?The focus of this work was on investigating individual differences
in the tendency to accept bullshit statements, and
our initial evidence indicates that reflectiveness may be a
key individual difference variable. At a very basic level,
the willingness to stop and think analytically about the actual
meanings of the presented words and their associations
would seem an a priori defense against accepting bullshit
at face value (i.e., to avoid an excessively open-minded response
bias).
I guess this probably has a lot to do with it. If you're not very smart to begin with, you probably don't know when you're hearing or reading bullshit.The present findings also provide evidence that an increased knowledge
of word meaning (via verbal intelligence) may assist in
critical analysis. An understanding of more precisely nuanced
meanings of words may reveal inconsistencies, incongruities,
and conflicts among terms in bullshit statements.
Conflict detection is a key aspect of dual-process theories
(e.g., De Neys, 2012; Pennycook, et al., 2015), though in
this case it remains unclear precisely what features of bullshit
statements might cue reflective thinking.
Awesome read. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Member
Great article, thanks Noah. One of my favorite lines: "This attention check proved rather difficult with 35.4% of the sample failing (N = 99)."
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