Peace Prize winner Gordon Pennycook and colleagues did an experiment about how to disrupt the workings of genuinely faked news. They published a study about what they learned: “Timing Matters When Correcting Fake News,” Nadia M. Brashier, Gordon Pennycook, Adam J. Berinsky, and David G. Rand, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, […]
Tag: bullshit
Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol
If you savor the savoring of bullshit, here are two useful essays. Each was published in The Last Word on Nothing: “Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol” by Ann Finkbeiner. and “The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention” by Michelle Nijhuis. The ‘Pocket Guide’ includes this graphic: An older guide, harmonious with the Nujhuis “Pocket Guide”, […]
“Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder” (new research study)
Jonathan Fugelsang, whose team was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2016 for studying the power of pseudo-profound bullshit, has a new study, with other colleagues, about the power of bullshit: “Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder,” Martin Harry Turpin, Alexander C. Walker, Mane Kara-Yakoubian, Nina N. Gabert, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Jennifer A. Stolz, […]
Nathaniel Barr’s Ig Nobel lecture on Pseudo-Profound Bullshit
Nathaniel Barr did a five-minute-long talk about pseudo-profound bullshit, and then answered questions, two days after receiving the 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. That prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”. (The study […]
“Researchers retract a paper because it turns out not to be about bullshit”
Retraction Watch reports: Researchers retract a paper because it turns out not to be about bullshit …a group of environmental scientists in China… lost their 2019 article on soil contamination because what they thought was manure was in fact something else. The article, titled “Immobilization of heavy metals in e-waste contaminated soils by combined application […]
Testing receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit [new study]
The 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”. Reference: “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit” in Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563. Since […]
Burgeoning British appreciation of pseudo-profound bullshit
A new book—Business Bullshit, by André Spicer—follows in the tradition of the study that won the 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.” They published that study in the research journal […]
Pseudo-profound bullshit commemorated: The Laffer Curve
Today the New York Times celebrates, deadpan, a fake relic of a historically influential example of pseudo-profound bullshit. Under the headline “This Is Not Arthur Laffer’s Famous Napkin,” The Times says: It is one of the iconic moments in modern economics: A young professor named Arthur Laffer sketched a curve on a bar napkin in […]
The prize-winning lecture about recognizing bullshit
The 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize winners explain about people’s craving for bullshit, in their Ig Informal Lecture, as you see in this video: The prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”. The details of […]
University Course Proposal: “Calling Bullshit”
Professors Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West from University of Washington have developed a new interdisciplinary course with the compelling title of Calling Bullshit. From publication bias to fake news, bullshit is everywhere. And it’s important to be able to navigate it, separate delusion from reality, and call out bullshit when we see it. In a post-truth world, […]