Data Skeptic15 Jan 2016

Detecting Pseudo-profound BS

A recent paper in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making titled On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit explores empirical questions around a reader's ability to detect statements which may sound profound but are actually a collection of buzzwords that fail to contain adequate meaning or truth. These statements are definitively different from lies and nonesense, as we discuss in the episode.

This paper proposes the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) and empirically demonstrates that it correlates with existing metrics like the Cognitive Reflection Test, building confidence that this can be a useful, repeatable, empirical measure of a person's ability to detect pseudo-profound statements as being different from genuinely profound statements. Additionally, the correlative results provide some insight into possible root causes for why individuals might find great profundity in these statements based on other beliefs or cognitive measures.

The paper's lead author Gordon Pennycook joins me to discuss this study's results.

If you'd like some examples of pseudo-profound bullshit, you can randomly generate some based on Deepak Chopra's twitter feed.

To read other work from Gordon, check out his Google Scholar page and find him on twitter via @GordonPennycook.

And just for fun, if you think you've dreamed up a Data Skeptic related pseudo-profound bullshit statement, tweet it with hashtag #pseudoprofound. If I see an especially clever or humorous one, I might want to send you a free Data Skeptic sticker.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(601)

Animal Decision Making

On today's episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center. Aimee...

12 Mar 202437min

Octopus Cognition

We are joined by Tamar Gutnick, a visiting professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. She studies the octopus nervous system and their behavior, focusing on cognition and learni...

8 Mar 202438min

Optimal Foraging

Claire Hemmingway, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, is our guest today. Her research is on decis...

28 Feb 202438min

Memory in Chess

On today's show, we are joined by our co-host, Becky Hansis-O'Neil. Becky is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, where she studies bumblebees and tarantulas to understand their le...

12 Feb 202448min

OpenWorm

On this episode, we are joined by Stephen Larson, the CEO of MetaCell and an affiliate of the OpenWorm foundation. Stephen discussed what the Openworm project is about. They hope to use a digital C. e...

5 Feb 202434min

What the Antlion Knows

Our guest is Becky Hansis-O'Neil, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, and our co-host for the new "Animal Intelligence" season. Becky shares her background on how she got into the...

30 Jan 202441min

AI Roundtable

Kyle is joined by friends and former guests Pramit Choudhary and Frank Bell to have an open discussion of the impacts LLMs and machine learning have had in the past year on industry, and where things ...

17 Jan 202450min

Uncontrollable AI Risks

We are joined by Darren McKee, a Policy Advisor and the host of Reality Check — a critical thinking podcast. Darren gave a background about himself and how he got into the AI space. Darren shared his ...

27 Des 202338min