If you find motivational statements trite and over-simplified
ADB-160320#157
If you should ever get stuck, follow these simple instructions:
PUSH
If you find motivational statements trite and over-simplified then just try pulling from the other side.
I’m not in the habit of reading academic papers, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the motivational poster craze and the rise of empty pinterest quotes. Here are a few I made up while I was in the bathroom this morning:
There’s only room in the universe for one of you.
Don’t just follow your dreams, let your dreams follow you.
These statements are seemingly wise if you decide to internalize and interpret them to fit your own psychological needs. But they do not contain much substance in and of themselves. Their meaning must be projected by the receiver. And if your bullshit detectors are weak or malfunctioning, you might even feel inspired. There is nothing inherently wrong or immoral about this, but I prefer rigorous self-awareness to ignorant bliss (which might explain why I’m difficult to live with).
Enter Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler, and Fugelsang—five psychological scientists who literally wrote the paper on bullshit detection. It’s called On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, and it’s amazing. They defer to Harry Frankfurt, who literally wrote the book on bullshit, called On Bullshit:
[Bullshit is] something that is designed to impress but that was constructed absent [of] direct concern for the truth.
So they ask the question, “Who is most likely to fall prey to bullshit and why?” In this day, in this age, with our access to the infinite (which includes infinite crap), it is more important than ever to seperate the good from the poop.
Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before…Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008).
Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.”
Guilty.
Bullshit is very popular, yet harder to detect if you are cognitively impaired, blindly religious, or critically lazy. The authors cite, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the lethal combination of Twitter and Deepak Chopra has disseminated more BS than we can process. If all academic papers were written this way, I would have stayed in university.
One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own…
If you want to add more BS to the universe, this New Age Bullshit Generator is a brilliant cosmic shoveler.
Transformation is the knowledge of synchronicity, and of us. We exist as a resonance cascade.
TThe ‘Please Recommend’ Haiku
To ev’ry writer
That little green heart below
Is total bullshit
