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Why Some People Think Total Nonsense Is Really Deep (washingtonpost.com)
Earthquake Retrofit writes: The Washington Post has a story about Gordon Pennycook, a doctorate student at the University of Waterloo who studies why some people are more easily duped than others. "Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" was one of many randomly generated sentences Pennycook, along with a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, used in a new, four-part study (PDF) put together to gauge how receptive people are to nonsense.
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
The biggest problem in religious belief is unconditional acceptance of dogma and a tendency not to question what one is told. Modern atheists often have their own dogmas, and all the same problems.
John_Chalisque
From The not-very-proFound Article:
The precise reasons that people see profundity in vague buzzwords or syntactic but completely random sentences are unknown.
I think a large reason for the phenomenon (accepting the premise of around a quarter uncritical test subjects uncritically for the sake of the argument) is for the same reason that a whole city, save one child, all said how nice the emperor's new clothes are (despite all seeing his imperial nakedness): not wanting to look foolish/out-of-fashion/contrary to society in the eyes of their peers.
In other words: I read a random phrase that is touted as being (at least mildly, score 1) profound. It contains some multi-syllable words. I don't really understand it, but I guess it must be somewhat profound - philosophy have for ages given new meanings to existing words and fixed combinations thereof (heck, the media does so every day these days), so maybe this is another example where those words mean something that I haven't encountered yet in my academically undistinguished career - so just to be safe and not the laughing stock of all those ivory tower dwellers, I give it a score of 3 or 4.
And voilà!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
if logic is cast aside, then internal/external consistency aren't necessarily valid ways to judge a philosophy's validity.
As a philosopher and logician, I fail to see why someone's "philosophy" shouldn't be judged on the basis of consistency like everything else, just because that person refuses validity, consistency, etc for him- or herself. Surely you must try to understand someone else's position first, but that cannot mean that you can only evaluate that position by adopting it - that would make no sense. Besides, it is my experience after 20 years of doing philosophy that people who refuse logic and mathematical method in general really just do so out of laziness, fear, and sometimes even hatred against things they believe they can't understand. Their criticisms are practically always insubstantial and uninteresting, and have been discussed within the discipline extensively before.
Anti-logical attitudes are particularly amusing and depressing at the same time, because for most purported criticisms of logic there is already a logic as a remedy. (A valid criticism may be that there are too many logics, but you rarely hear that one from non-logicians.)
No.
i.e. = 'id est' = 'that is' = a clarification or further expansion on meaning.
e.g. = 'exempli gratia' = 'for example' = an example or illustration of what is being discussed.
they are *not* interchangeable, they mean different things, and are being used incorrectly in the summary, regardless of whether it is a direct quote or not.
if you still can't figure it out, re-read the summary out loud twice, first replacing uses of 'i.e.' with 'that is' and then 'for example'.
if you still can't figure it out, it's aliens.
There is a long list of cognitive biases to which ALL humans with biological brains and nervous systems are susceptible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Many of them come down to nonsense and noise appearing to make sense.
Because that is the primary function of our brains - making sense and information out of completely random stimuli generated by the world around us.
It's not a game.
It's a necessity for a crushable biological entity to quickly make sense of those vibrations it's sensors are picking up.
Is it thunder, wind or is something heavy coming down on it from above?
Quick! Milliseconds mean life or... too late.
We get pareidolia cause those who didn't recognize that bear-shaped object in the distance didn't make it through the evolutionary process.
Not cause we adapted to think that teddy bears are cute or so that we could interpret smileys and emoji.
And when we can't make sense of some stimuli - we start getting anxious and afraid. And that makes us stupid. And then we get hurt and then we die.
Which is why we'll jump on any quick and easy explanation like "ghosts" or "aliens" or conspiracy theories.
Cause they can provide easy and simple solutions to ANY unsolvable problem. And they provide it quickly.
Why am I poor? Because secret world government keeps me that way.
Why am I ugly? Because aliens made me so.
Why did I get an incurable disease when I'm really a nice person? Because chemtrails.
Why will I and everyone else I love eventually have to die? So we can live forever in a much better place.
Why did my tire blow out? Bad luck. Or gremlins.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually, they are used correctly. The cognitive abilities the study used were verbal and fluid intelligence and numeracy. Thus, i.e. rightly denotes the complete list.
Actually, there's a further nuance to all this. The summary quotes the Washington Post:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
The first "i.e." is actually in the original study, and as you point out, it is used correctly to reference the complete list of things they were studying.
The second "i.e." is, you will note, in brackets, because this is an explanation inserted by the Washington Post writer. The original sentence from the study reads:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
Hence, it's the WASHINGTON POST which doesn't know how to use "i.e." correctly. If you read the original study, it's clear that it has a LOT of "e.g" and "i.e." In fact, it probably has a little too much of them, but they appear to be used correctly.