How often do we find something interesting and deep that we don't understand? Who has a penchant for taking sublime, nonsensical phrases at face value?
We live in the information age, and this paradoxically means that we are drowning in a sea of relentless disinformation. Actually: each of us in a week meets with more nonsense than a person who lived 1000 years ago met in his entire life! This is natural: if you count all the words in all scientific works that were published before the Enlightenment, their number will be several orders of magnitude less than the number of meaningless words that appear on the Internet every day.
Not bad, right? Are you impressed? If, reading the previous paragraph, you nodded your head in agreement, think again: this is a deception, a set of words. How can anyone know how much nonsense "each of us" has encountered in a week? And what does "in a week" mean? In the last seven days? Or since last Sunday? And how can we all the more know how much people suffered from nonsense ten centuries ago?
One of the most disgusting varieties of nonsense is pseudoscientific nonsense. Example? You are welcome. In the article “Polish scientists create technology ahead of European and world developments”, posted on the pages of one of the Gazeta Wyborcza applications, you can read: “Nutrivi living water is 99.9% pure water with an ordered structure and a smaller particle size than water industrial, consisting of large clusters. Being a carrier and solvent of active substances, it penetrates to the deepest cellular level, perfectly moisturizes and starts self-regeneration processes. " Smaller particle size water? Like this? Smaller atoms? By what miracle does it maintain an ordered structure while remaining in a liquid state? What does the phrase "industrial water" mean?Who collected it into clusters and what are “water clusters”? This is nothing more than pseudo-scientific nonsense. Which, unfortunately, did not raise doubts either from the author or from, frankly, the editorial board.
According to Professor Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton University philosopher and author of an excellent book on the imposition of lies, bullshit is a statement made without the slightest intention of making it true. Its main task is not to convey information, but to impress the addressee. "Nonsense" should be distinguished from ordinary lies, which, curiously, are created in reliance on the truth: after all, it is designed to hide or distort it. It is impossible to lie without knowing the truth. Lying is a completely different thing. For its author, truth and falsehood do not matter in the least. It is only important to attract attention to yourself.
Nonsense generator
Although bullshit is ubiquitous, it is rarely scientifically analyzed. How easy is it for people to tell that they are being told nonsense? Who is the most gullible? Gordon Pennycook, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, tried to answer these questions in his work under the eloquent title "On the perception and identification of pseudo-deep bullshit".
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In his research, Pennikuk used two internet nonsense generators. The first, available at Wisdomofchopra.com, constructs meaningless but grammatically correct phrases (like "Imagination lies within the exponential space-time of events"). It uses the words most often found in the aphorisms by Deepak Chopra. This Indian American is writing books on spirituality and alternative medicine. The second service, The New Age Bullshit Generator from Sebpearce.com/bullshit, works on the same principle, but operates on a slightly different set of keywords collected by its creator ("the raison d'être of four-dimensional superstructures is to create seeds of life, not suffering").
Pennikuk showed the created nonsensical phrases to a group of 300 students, asking them to rate the "depth" of the statements on a scale from 1 (no deep meaning) to 5 (very deep meaning). The nonsense received an average mark of 2.6 points, which means that the students found it quite deep, and one quarter of the participants in the experiment even very deep. The next experiment used real aphorisms from Chopra's website (for example: "Nature is a self-regulating system of consciousness"). They received almost the same score as the phrases generated by the generator. In experiments three and four, students were asked to comment on simple, commonplace phrases such as “most people enjoy some genre of music,” “babies need to be cared for,” and famous aphorisms that are considered wise.but they are formulated in simple understandable language ("water wears away the stone not by force, but by the frequency of falling").
The result turned out to be quite surprising: understandable aphorisms were rated worse, that is, they were recognized as less deep in meaning than muddy, meaningless phrases! Why do people see depth in them? Some may not realize that something seems incomprehensible to them simply because there is nothing to understand. Others simply approach what they hear without being critical.
Participants in Pennikuk's experiment answered questions designed to determine their cognitive ability, propensity for analytical thinking, level of understanding of ontological categories, as well as religious beliefs, attitudes towards conspiracy theories and the paranormal. The scientist wanted to find the factor that is most closely related to the ability to "identify nonsense." As it turned out, the most credulous (who called meaningless statements deep) were people with a lower level of intelligence, who did not have developed analytical thinking and the ability to distinguish between ontological categories. Also, compliance to "nonsense" significantly correlated with religiosity, belief in paranormal phenomena and things that cannot be proved by empirical methods (for example, that illness can be cured by prayer),conspiracy theories and the effectiveness of alternative medicine. Skeptical and rational people with a higher intellectual level turned out to be less gullible. Curiously, mathematical ability and good numeracy did not in any way affect the ability to distinguish between wheat and chaff.
The world of conspiracy theories is orderly, hierarchical and fair: ideal for the lonely and insecure Westerner.
Working about bullshit is also bullshit
Pennikuk's work is not devoid of simplifications. Many claims can also be made against the research material itself, that is, samples of meaningless phrases. The mere use of the Internet generator does not guarantee at all that the resulting phrases are meaningless.
"Science tells us today that the essence of nature is joy." This phrase obtained with the help of the generator is not "nonsense": it is understandable and obviously does not correspond to the truth. She's just stupid. You can find more such examples in the work. Perhaps this means that Pennikuk did not study the phenomenon of "nonsense", and the conclusion of his research is quite banal: it only shows that those who give high marks to silly statements are statistically more stupid than those who reject silly phrases.
Another weak point of the work is that a living language requires a context, it cannot be reduced to phrases built on the principle of formal logic. What is nonsense and what is not cannot be judged from examples taken out of context. Here is a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "A rose has teeth in the mouth of an animal." Without context, it sounds meaningless, but in the text of a philosopher it acquires a clear and concrete meaning.
Sokal's provocation
The claims of being out of context cannot be made to Professor Alan Sokal's work Breaking Boundaries: Toward the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The New York physicist published an article in 1996 in the pages of Social Text, a prestigious journal dedicated to the social sciences. It was impossible to understand anything from the text, but not because it was talking about the deepest and most abstract theories of modern physics. In fact, he did not talk about anything. The article consisted of randomly combined statements and texts of postmodern thinkers, seasoned with scattered concepts from mathematics and quantum physics.
The publication was successful and highly debated. When its real meaning (that is, the lack of it) became clear, the editor-in-chief of Social Text was fired, and the editors included Sokal in the list of authors whose work the magazine will no longer publish. Sokal's provocation excited the scientific community. Although it did not set a research goal, it made people think about mechanisms for identifying meaningless texts. Unfortunately, they did not appear less often.
Guru effect
Why are we so often ready to say, "there is something in this," when listening to or reading vague and incomprehensible statements? Why are we more likely to admit that we are to blame for not understanding the full depth than to ask for clarity and explanation? Our education system plays a role in this. The school devotes a lot of time to communicating ready-made facts that the student must remember, usually taking them on faith and not subjecting them to critical analysis.
In the first year of the physics department, a teacher asked us to prove the Pythagorean theorem. This caused a stir: everyone knew and remembered the theorem, but to prove it? How to prove? It never occurred to anyone to doubt and check what had to be learned by heart in school.
Another aspect is the “guru effect,” that is, agreement with completely incomprehensible theses that sound from the mouths of people using authority. Instead of demanding an explanation, we pretend to understand and agree. But the incomprehensible does not mean wise yet. This is just incomprehensible, which someone did not bother to explain well. Perhaps such an author himself is not as smart as he would like to appear?
After all, Einstein himself said: if you do not know how to explain something to a six-year-old child, then you yourself do not understand it well enough.
Irena Cieślińska