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comment by rrrrr
rrrrr  ·  3038 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why people think total nonsense is really deep.

What would constitute an objective standard here? By what standard does the researcher judge which automatically generated statements are meaningless? If the algorithm slings words together into something that one person finds meaningful but another doesn't, who's to say that the more skeptical judge is simply correct? One person might find a poem profound that another finds meaningless, and in that context we don't say one is wrong and the other right, because we understand that reading poetry is an active interplay between the reader and the poem. Why then declare that there is an objective standard of meaningfulness in computer-generated new agey statements?

I clicked the bullshit generator a few times. Most of these statements strike me as pseudo-profound junk, but occasionally one pops up that gives me pause. For example, "Turbulence is born in the gap where awareness has been excluded." I read that and thought, yes, it's easy to slip into a frantic spin when you're not paying attention to your life. This randomly generated statement suggests something to me that it might not to someone else. Who's right? There's no right, of course. How you read it depends what you bring to it. So I'm a little suspicious of an experiment that starts out from the premise, "These statements are meaningless."

Which isn't to say the experiment is worthless. It shows that people handle these statements differently, and one group might see the other as credulous while the other may see the first as lacking imagination. But if you then ask, "who's right?" you should watch what standards you smuggle in to that question.





caeli  ·  3037 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not to mention the utter shittiness of the analysis. You can't interpret the numerical score on a Likert scale literally -- a score of 3 doesn't mean "profound" unless you have more context. This is why researchers using scale judgments convert them to z-scores so you can say whether they were rated more or less profound than the overall average rating. This all required you to have both unambiguously un-profound and profound statements as well as those in the middle. And as you said, there's no objective way to quantify the profundity!

This is why social psychology studies never replicate, they're all ridiculous crap like this.....

Kajman  ·  3038 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not only do I agree that these phrases aren't necessarily meaningless because they were not intended to be hold meaning, but IIRC the 'researcher' said the average ratings for these statements were about ~2.3/5 or "relatively profound" - something that strikes me as merely being worth pause, rather than this genius scholar's successful trickery in getting plebs to believe in like, totally fake philosophy that he like, didn't even muse on.