In this short video, Harry Frankfurt tells you what bullshit is, and how to recognize it. If you want to do some genuine good for the world: show the video to two friends, and ask each of them to show it to two friends.
Tag: bullshit
Master bullshit analyst graduates, heads off to Yale
The University of Waterloo celebrated the graduation of Gordon Pennycook, who last month, together with his colleagues, was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. The university writes: Psych scholar whose research gained global attention graduates Gordon Pennycook published research on everything from BS to how smartphone use is linked to lazy thinking. Now he’s on […]
Video of the peace prize winner discussing bullshit and people who crave bullshit
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”. The study is: “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,” Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan […]
Recent progress in bullshit studies
In November last year, Improbable drew readers’ attention to a newly published experimental study by Gordon Pennycook (University of Waterloo, ON, Canada) et alli in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, “Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”. We can now report that the same journal has published a rejoinder, in the form of a commentary […]
“Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”
Bullshit and academia continue their delighted dance. Behold a new study: “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,” Gordon Pennycook [pictured here], James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563. The authors, at the University of Waterloo, explain: ‘Although […]
Social Media + BS
“What does the future hold for social media and bullshit?” asks professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Univ. Oxford, UK) in a new communication published in the journal Social Media + Society (“An online, open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal deeply committed to advancing the understanding of social media and its impact on societies past, present and future.”) The […]
Extending Bullshit Studies – more from Academia
Emeritus Professor Harry Frankfurt’s essay-that-turned-into-a-book ‘On Bullshit’ (see Annals of Improbable Research, March | April 2009, volume 15, number 2, p. 25 ) set the stage for further academic research on the subject of BS. And now the field has been explored further with a paper in College English, Vol. 73, No. 3, January 2011, […]
Dobbs’s How to Set the Bullshit Filter
David Dobbs wrote an essay (for Wired) called How to Set the Bullshit Filter When the Bullshit is Thick, about how to go about interpreting reported news about science. Dobbs does not say it, but the situation may be even worse when it comes to interpreting reported news of almost any other kind. (Thanks to […]