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posted by martyb on Saturday December 12 2015, @12:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the orly? dept.

I receive the Bright's Bulletin from The Brights Net (http://www.the-brights.net/) (A "bright" (n.) is a person whose worldview is naturalistic (no supernatural and mystical elements)) and the December issue highlights an article from the Journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM): On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

From the Bulletin:

Receptivity for "Bullshit" Scrutinized

The authors of a recent article in the Journal of Judgment and Decisionmaking do not hold back. Having considered "nonsense" and "rubbish" inadequate to the phenomenon of interest, they deem "bullshit" a consequential aspect of the human condition and set about to put at least one type of it under empirical investigation.

Titling their report, "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," they define the attribute as "seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous."

After pursuing 4 different studies regarding bullshit detection, the authors conclude, among other things:

"[W]ith the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before."... [S]ome people are more receptive to this type of bullshit" and "[D]etecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims."

The study is serious, but reading it is likely to bring chuckles to many Brights who would like to think that Deepak Chopra would not be pleased by the scrutiny.

The article:

http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

or

http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html*

I'm not sure which is more newsworthy: the article contents or the fact that "bullshit" is a mainstream English word now!


Original Submission

*Update: 12/14 14:18 GMT by mrcoolbp : I updated the second link as per the submitter

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:22AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:22AM (#275680) Journal
    Yes, I have to agree. However. this brings up a well-established application to decision making that is worth mentioning here. There's a sort of placebo effect that IMHO can result in better decision making even though it should be complete bullshit. Let's start with the basic scenario. A person faces a situation or choice that confounds them, namely, they don't know what they want/should do. They're waffling and they need to make the decision soon. Then they undergo a ritual, such as I Ching or opening a religious text (Bible, etc) to a random location and ruminating over the applicability of the passage read to the problem to be solved. And then based on the outcome of that, they make the decision.

    Here, the placebo has at least two beneficial effects. First, it forces them to think about the problem a bit differently. Second, it commits them to a choice, which is usually better than waffling, if they resort to these schemes in the first place. Obviously, their choice could be poorer than optimal, but if they were having such a hard time in the first place to decide, then it's probably not that big a deal.
  • (Score: 2) by unzombied on Sunday December 13 2015, @07:02AM

    by unzombied (4572) on Sunday December 13 2015, @07:02AM (#275712)
    Or they could toss a coin and see what they hoped it would be while still in the air. Is that a good way to make a decision? (And here we stray from making sense to making choices.) I'm going to go with, in general, "no."