Framing of questions always affects the outcome of answers.

Lastly, a few of these read like the Chopra quote generator. http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/

I guess I can see how this might be classed as "not bullshit", but I don't see how it's profound at all. It just seems false to me.

I agreed with all the other classifications.

edit: I know complaining about downvotes is verboten here, but seriously, that's just my take on it. I'd be interested to hear an explanation of what the profound meaning is that I'm missing here.

The underlying point is that whether you think that someone's suffering (physical or emotional) has a real or imaginary cause, that doesn't make them suffer any more or less, because you are not in their head, and they are not in yours. Their degree of suffering depends on their perception of reality, not yours, or even objective reality.

The statement is an appeal to empathy.

Apparently, I'm a highly functioning sociopath then ;).

If you're going by effort, it seems that your interpretation is anything but simpler or lower effort.

If you're trying to make the point that the statement could have been phrased better, I don't think anyone would disagree with you.

Hmm? You seem to be mixing up the effort required to reach that interpretation with the effort required to argue with other people about whether it's the correct interpretation.

One thing I found interesting is how incredibly subjective and relative painful experiences are. Increasing and varied types of pain would typically be inflicted over the course of an experiment, while I had to perform various tasks and grade the pain on a scale from 0-10.

Very often I'd grade the initial pain around 6-7, and increase that to the maximum of 9-10 during the experiment. The pain I experienced by the end would however be much more severe, and if I could've corrected the initial grading it'd have been closer to 2-3.

I guess you could say that I was unable to imagine the level of pain I'd later experience, and how relative pain is perceived in this type of experiment.

Just a tangential anecdote, but I didn't call BS on that statement :)

In any case, the sentence doesn't seem to require the imaginary pain to be equivalent (or even compared) to the pain experienced from whatever is causing the imaginary pain. I don't think that's even possible.

It just requires that the pain someone experience from imagining/actually being tortured hurts just as much, albeit likely differently, regardless of the nature or cause of the pain ("imagined"/"real").

The "profoundness" of the sentence is probably related to the already questionable concept "imagined pain"; and how the pain experienced by other people can easily, and way to often, be dismissed and classified as "imaginary".

The pain still hurts the person experiencing it though, regardless of whether some might call it imaginary (and whether "imaginary pain" even makes sense).

Right, but imagining being tortured doesn't hurt just as much as being tortured. That is why the sentence strikes me as obviously false.

>The pain still hurts the person experiencing though, regardless of whether some might call it imaginary.

Yes, people might disagree about whether or not someone is in pain. Similarly, they might disagree about whether or not someone is eating cake. That doesn't mean that "imaginary cake tastes just as good as real cake".

That might be the case, but it's probably not the relevant comparison. The relevant comparison, for the sentence to be true, would be between "The imagined pain experienced from thinking about torture" and "The pain experienced from thinking about torture".

Or to put it another way (in the same format as the sentence we're debating): "The imagined pain experienced from thinking about torture does not hurt less than the pain experienced from thinking about torture".

I think the profoundness here is more related to the word "imaginary" being unnecessary (and even harmful) as it relates to suffering. My sentence above might make it more obvious that "imaginary pain" is somewhat ridiculous in the first place, but it is however used to dismiss people who are hurting.

> Yes, people might disagree about whether or not someone is in pain. Similarly, they might disagree about whether or not someone is eating cake. That doesn't mean that "imaginary cake tastes just as good as real cake".

If a person is conscious and claim to be in pain, that person is in pain, and it doesn't matter if other people think differently.

Similarly, if someone is eating cake it's just weird for anyone else to disagree that they're eating cake, or even discuss the difference between the taste of cake and thinking about eating cake. People of course rarely question the reality and experiences associated with eating cake, but they do with people experiencing pain, which makes the sentence more insightful than you seem to believe.

In a sense this also kinda leads to the result of the study: I do see a point in the statement (and the other non-BS statements), and I think it's a lot more likely that I'll engage in prosocial behavior, such as relieving someone from pain others may describe and dismiss as "imaginary" - or for that matter giving someone the cake they want/need, whether that be real or imaginary ;)

I don't understand what the comparison is supposed to be there. You can't "experience" imagined pain. If you're saying that you can imagine being in lots of pain, and that imagining this scenario isn't itself painful, then of course everyone agrees with that. But this is a banal observation, and one that seems to contradict the original sentence.

>People of course rarely question the reality and experiences associated with eating cake, but they do with people experiencing pain, which makes the sentence more insightful than you seem to believe.

If you're saying "we should generally believe people when they say they're in pain", then sure, I agree with that. It's just not what the sentence we're discussing says.

Consider that you understood the statement without complaint of ambiguity, enough to question the truth of the assertion and discuss that with other people without your having to impart your own meaning that you construct. And consider the gyrations and gymnastics that people are applying in this very discussion to impart their own meanings to the other statements that are without consistent unambiguous meaning.

To question whether it should properly be called profound would be, conversely, to question the paper's methodology. There is, as I said, a definition of bullshit. There is no equivalent definition of profundity. Nor were test subjects asked to evaluate the sentences with an explicit profundity criterion. The so-called profoundness-receptivity metric was actually a measurement of bullshit-receptivity of non-bullshit statements.

Yes, because it's difficult for a statement to be both profound and obviously false.

I just said that it's obviously false, so I don't understand why it is labeled "profound" in the paper. That's it.

#11 counters people's default assumption that imagined pain doesn't hurt, because it's not real. You gain more understanding of people who report imagined pain by assuming it hurts the same (even if it might actually hurt a little less) than by assuming it doesn't hurt at all.

In the book Dune, Paul Atreides' hand is put in a pain-simulating device and he has to demonstrate his humanity by resisting the urge to pull it out or he'll be killed by a cyanide needle in the neck. You can only understand that scene by assuming the simulated pain hurts as much as real pain.

Alternatively, someone with a mental condition that leads them to believe they are in pain would conceivably feel the same pain as someone who is actually being physically hurt.

Just my take on it.

That's exactly the point of the sentence.

It does. But read what the sentence says about "imaginary pain"—that it still hurts. That feeling of hurt is pain. So the sentence is saying that "imaginary pain" is just "pain". So pain that you might think is imaginary, is actually real.

That's exactly what you're getting wrong. "Imaginary pain" does not mean "imagining a situation where imaginary-you is in pain". It means pain with imaginary causes that applies to the real you.

Most people in this thread see it as real physical pain conjured up by one's imagination - so things like psychosomatic pain, pain caused by mental illness, pain caused by fears, etc. So think of someone getting dizzy from their fear of heights, or a hoarder doubled over retching because someone is throwing away parts of their hoard.

Whereas you in essence think that it's an oxymoron - if it's real pain, it by definition can't be imaginary. So it's just a thought exercise or a theatrical performance.

So maybe the sentence would be less bullshitty if it read "irrational pain" or something like that.

But as most people read "imaginary pain" as "real pain felt, without reason" instead of "fake pain you're just imagining about", I think your reading of "imaginary" is too parsimonious.

No, I think that there is such a thing as imaginary pain, just as there is such a thing as an imaginary elephant. You can imagine being in pain. You can imagine an elephant. But if someone said "imaginary elephants weigh just as much as real elephants", I would be confused (unless they just meant that the imagined weight of the imagined elephant was equal to the weight of the real elephant).

That sentence may be obviously true, but it is not vacuous.

You can't grade pain on an objective scale based on what caused it. It's a subjective experience, and therefore if you truly imagine it, it exists.

>It's a subjective experience, and therefore if you truly imagine it, it exists.

Nope, I can imagine being in pain without being in pain. Similarly, taste is subjective, but I can't satisfy my appetite for chocolate by imagining eating it.

Also, we clearly can distinguish imaginary pain from real pain. For example, there's a difference between the real pain I feel if I stub my toe and the imaginary pain I "feel" if I imagine myself stubbing my toe.

So it may be quite a bullshit statement, depending on how you take it.

I guess you could debate whether that is "imagined".

2) Do we know that phantom limb pain does not hurt less than the corresponding non-phantom pains? It seems entirely possible that while phantom limb pain is very acute, it's not as actually as bad as the pain associated with losing the limb in the first place.

3) Even waiving 1 and 2, that would be one rather obscure instance of an imaginary pain and a real pain having the same intensity, which would in no way establish the truth of the general statement.

I was still wrong, because I categorize them differently (not that one is necessarily easier to deal with than the other).

In the end it comes down to semantics either way.

Believing pain to not be lesser because it comes from psychosomatic sources is reasonably - Most people will act similarly in my experience, and in any case the statement is saying something

Contrast that with the bullshit statements - “The whole silence infinite phenomena”

Basically this: http://www.robot-hugs.com/helpful-advice/

The point seems to be more about being able to detect that the “bullshit” sentences are completely and utterly meaningless despite being (for the most part) grammatically correct and sounding similarly woo-ish to the “profound” ones on the surface.

Come on people, this is just loosely correlated with donating time and money to charity in a study that has decent odds of having primarily been done to grab headlines - don't take it too personally, and maybe go donate if you're really that concerned. Don't feel too defined by a 13 question true/false quiz.

(Disclaimer: I fall in the "1 wrong" group)

first sentence for example, any engineer knows that strong water jets can precisely cut steel in seconds, much better than any persistent river over several generations.

Also, they picked the most subjective "pro-social" measurements. It boils down to "volunteering" (time or money), no matter to what (can have been antifa, MAGA, etc)

I agree the whole thing is dubious, but that's a pretty weird criticism to pick out. The sentence specifically says "river" and is true of rivers; the fact that water jet cutters exist is irrelevant.

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. Their frequent and loud use of this word to interrupt lectures, dialogs, private conversations, etc., exacerbated the divide between Procian and Halikaarnian orders that characterized the mathic world in the years leading up to the Third Sack. Shortly before the Third Sack, all of theKnights of Saunt Halikaarn were Thrown Back, so little more is known about them (their frequent appearance in Sæcular entertainments results from confusion between them and the Incanters).

Usage note: In the mathic world, if the word is suddenly shouted out in a chalk hall or refectory it brings to mind the events associated with sense (3) and is therefore to be avoided. Spoken in a moderate tone of voice, it takes on sense (2), which long ago lost any vulgar connotations it may once have had. In the Sæculum it is easily confused with sense (1) and deemed a vulgarity or even an obscenity. It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt- talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places the mathic observer in a nearly impossible position. One is forced either to use this “offensive” word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becoming a purveyor of bulshytt oneself and thereby lending strength to what one is trying to attack. The latter quality probably explains the uncanny stability and resiliency of bulshytt. Resolving this dilemma is beyond the scope of this Dictionary and is probably best left to hierarchs who make it their business to interact with the Sæculum. — THE DICTIONARY , 4th edition, A.R. 3000

The aphorism concerns a river, not an industrial cutting machine.

Is there a better demonstration of American pragmatism?

I interpreted this one as referencing doppler shift of light emitted by celestial objects due to relative motion, but apparently I was overthinking this.

That said, the phrase remains mostly meaningless without more context; I'm certainly not trying to defend the phrase itself.

There has to be a typo here, right?

I marked this as “bullshit” because it doesn’t make sense. But the link says it’s not bullshit...

This one annoys me, because of it's ether/or proposition when it is more of a and/or function.

Yes, water including rivers cuts through rocks in more than one way. For example, Ph differences in the water can cause chemical weathering of the rock. In general these effects happen slowly and need to be persistent for any measurable effect.

But to deny the absolute power of a raging torrent and the amount of physical landscape change it is capable of in just moments is absolute folly. A swift river full of sand and chunks of rock can act like a water cutter or a sand blaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods are a testament to the power of water.

It's like taking issue with another of the profound statements: "Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in."

"Well, no," you point out, "you could be carried in by the teacher. Or maybe you're in a wheelchair and you need to wheel in."

The door, and stepping, in this case, are to be understood metaphorically. So is the river and the rock.

As no engineer ever said, "The house built from enlightenment has insufficient amps coming into the breaker panel."

The philosopher makes a profound statement that less sophisticated thinkers can understand. The engineer just builds a hydraulic cutter that is remarkable in its system to keep the silicon carbide grit slurry from clotting in the supply lines, and asks which river rock you want sliced up.

Intentionally missing the point is a form of trolling. And it's super fun when it's deflating the pomposity out of someone.

Basically the test is immune to this kind of criticism, because it's only interested in your response to it.

And lo and behold if you "troll" it by declaring it all bullshit, you're a type A engineer willing to argue over meaningless things, which certainly isn't very prosocial, whatever value it otherwise brings.

This actually caught me and I found myself trying to game the test itself.

For the first one, I was like "Yeah, it's true and is saying that persistence is important if you want to achieve your goals, but it's kind of a bullshitty way to say it" And then reading the rest, they all felt like they belonged on posters of silhouetted people looking over mighty vistas. So I declared the entire exercise a trick question.

Also. Water saws are fucking scary.

Persistence can be key to accomplishing something significant you don't feel capable of.

Or am I being too charitable?

As well, it anthropormorphizes the effect of gravity on water as 'persistence.' It might serve as a fine metaphor for human persistence but that's all.

I think it's key to read it a specific (overly charitable?) light.

You kind of have to take for granted that it's good advice in context. Someone is feeling discouraged and incapable facing come significant task and the best advice is to not be distracted by the feelings of incapability but rather persevere.

If you're reading it as statement on the relationship between power and persistence .. um .. you're missing it's point. Whether you agree or think it isn't well communicated is besides the point a little bit.

If you have to spend a minute thinking about erosion first then it loses its punch.

That's what it's intended to do. It's not trying to be a statement about Geology.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755

"BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS"

“CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING"

  1 False, there is no persistence in the absence of power
  2 False, the hidden/unknown has no transformative effect unless it is revealed
  3 Missing information, what are 'irrational facts'?
  4 Highly debatable, situational
  5 False, creativity is not bound to either health or tolerance but modified through their experience.
  6 Flowery way to say we like to shift perspective unto flaws that are not our own? We certainly have a track record when it comes to this behavior. Still not universally true.
  7 You cannot be forced to learn. Context dependent.
  8 Universal observations? Movement as in 'through life' (experience)? Our observations are contextualized by past experiences. Unsure about this sentence.
  9 The person who has never tried anything literally died in the womb.
  10 Missing context.
  11 Being in pain is painful, 'imagined pain' makes no sense.
  12 What, missing context.
  13 What is 'the inherent experience of the universe'? Can the unexplainable touch anything?
  14 Correct, being temped can be interpreted to be done unto you, not falling for temptation is the act of resisting it. There is *a difference*.

Jokes aside, I do like to help people out but won't go out of my way to seek opportunities to do so.

(If you're finding it TLDR then at least skip to the list of numbered propositions in the middle)

A "nosology of thought" sounds like a fine research program, but a manifesto about it ought to at least give a few examples to show the criteria for helpful diagnostics.

I like the dialog with Muggeridge at the end, though.

This statement confuses cause (some damage) and effect (pain) and so should be in the bullshit category, or else it's poorly written/translated.

An imagined cause may lead to real pain, for example if you believe you've been betrayed but you haven't. The pain is the same as if you had actually been betrayed, and in both cases that pain isn't imagined, it's a real mental, neurological phenomenon.

But the only pain that's imagined is pain that's not happening to us, like someone else's pain and future pain, and sorry but despite all sympathy and fear, yeah that does usually hurt a lot less.

Same as 'irrational fears are scary despite being irrational', or 'imaginary fears are scary despite being imaginary'.

We can imagine other people's pain, however, or hypothetical pain, and that is not the same as experiencing pain itself.

By the same logic, I can feel happy just by imagining myself feeling happy?

Responding to your edit:

>whether there is even a difference between feeling happy and “being” happy.

That's not the question. The question is whether there's a difference between feeling happy and imagining yourself feeling happy.

If you answer, well laughter is physical while pain is mental, then I will ask you how that is a genuine dichotomy. The mental representation of unexperienced pain is also, in truth, a physical phenomenon since the mind is a physical experience, but the mental representation of pain is not the same as experienced pain.

But pain or pleasure, sadness or happiness from some imagined event, yes, that's real and it's what the original sentence intended to say, I believe.

Edit: This was meant as a reply to addicted rather than foldr...

However, I get that the most effective torture doesn't rely on actual physical pain. The worst thing is the knowledge that one is being permanently disfigured. And that's all about imagining the future.

Can I call BS on getting the first its right and the 2nd one wrong?

On that subject, I would have classified 5 differently but it seems to be the highest score of the BS sentences so I guess it's debatable

> 3. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person.

I'm not a native English speaker, so I might be wrong, but I'm reading this as "the future will more likely reveal the truth to those who are open-minded" which seems to be too profound to be bullshit. Of course, "irrational fact" is an awkward way to refer to false beliefs, but awkwardness≠bullshit.

Metaphors are written to be interpreted more narrowly.

It's ... the difference is like going to an art museum, and on one wall, you have a painting featuring something recognizable as a person carrying a glass of water in a desert, and on the opposite wall, you have a blank canvas. There are multiple ways to interpret the painting of the person in the desert, and it'll have slightly different meanings to different people, but most of those will follow a similar theme. That painting has content. The blank canvas is intended for people to stare at it and invent their own meaning. It has no content. It's bullshit.

Basically if I couldn't understand and agree with or accept the statements at first glance then I considered them bullshit. It was an accurate result except for statement 5 with which I agreed.

The one that tripped me up was “imagined pain hurts not less because its imagined” Is that saying people who suffer psychologically actually suffer? Or should i take it at face bullshit value?

"Only by looking into the future will you find inconvenient/perplexing/complex/weird/unbelievable/seemingly paradoxical/unwanted truths/facts"

Where the "irrational fact" is very open to interpretation, however.

I did mark it as bullshit though, it's way way way too open to interpretation. It could be poetry, if presented in a reasonable context, I suppose.

They're otherwise pretty obvious.

The BS ones on the other hand are totally meaningless (to me , atleast) like -

"The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty."

Like WTF?

Something has 'abstract beauty' (as opposed to concrete, surface beauty) through some conceptual significance it contains; however, once you look more, there is a deeper hidden meaning to the concepts, which changes the beauty into something else.

Not BS! Take for instance, E=mc^2. Thought of as a beautiful equation by many in the sciences. But, one of the hidden meanings is you can make an atomic weapon using it, which transforms it to horror.

1. The river cuts through a rock because its power is above some threshold where it causes more than zero damage, and the damage multiplied by the persistence (time spent) is what it does to the rock. (Compare the photoelectric effect; if the photons are too weak, they don't do anything no matter how many you have.) Of course, a scientist probably wouldn't use that language.

2. A human who sees a hidden meaning in something may transform their opinion of something's beauty. A grain of truth under bullshit phrasing.

3. ... Now this I can't think of a non-bullshit interpretation for. The future hasn't happened yet, so it doesn't tell you anything, certainly not anything surprising, until it happens and then it's no longer the future.

4. True, though kind of tautological.

5. Health helps a brain be capable of creativity, sure. Tolerance helps not squash other people's creativity. Eh, it's kinda true.

6. I assume "other flaws" is meant to be "others' flaws". There is truth to this: at least for some kinds of flaws, it's easier to see them in others than in oneself.

7. See also "you can lead a horse to water...". Has a valid truth: I think most kinds of learning work much better when the learner is participating.

8. Um... ... universal observations? Like mathematical facts, or facts about the Sun that anyone can see? But my movement doesn't transform them. Bullshit.

9. Almost certainly true.

10. That isn't a sentence. If I try auto-correcting to "the whole silences infinite phenomena"... I guess you could E-prime-ify it to "a human who observes the whole may lose sight of the many little interesting details"... meh. I'm probably reading more insight into it than the author made an honest attempt to convey. Bullshit. By the way, I'm now suspecting an alternating bullshit/non-bullshit pattern.

11. I think this has a lot of truth to it, though it might not be true in all cases.

12. New immutability? What? I'm suspecting some of these are taken from http://wisdomofchopra.com/.

13. Ehm... one could say that we experience a lot of things without understanding (or being able to explain) most of them. "inherent experiences" sounds like experiences that every conceivable being has, which I'm not sure exist other than "the experience of consciousness and cognition", which beings probably must have in order to qualify as beings, but which are probably felt much differently by different beings. So no.

14. Agreed.

And, looking at the results... Yup, makes sense.

You are risking DoS attack, steelmanning statements from untrusted sources.

That works as a sentence even without the change. "The whole " can be parsed as "People who are whole".