The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit Quotes

“Critical thinking is a learned process of deliberation, fact checking, and self reflection used to comprehend and appropriately evaluate information in order to decide what to believe or what to do.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“Another surefire way to determine if someone is using pseudo-profundity is to ask them to clarify what they mean: “So you say, ‘Defund the police.’ What do you mean by that? What would that look like? How would it work? Tell me the logistics. How would we know it’s working?” There will be a stark difference in how academics and serious criminal-justice reform activists respond to these questions and how those who blindly advocate the phrase on Twitter respond. Clarification is a major antidote to bullshit because bullshitters find it difficult to clarify pseudo-profound bullshit by saying something that actually makes sense or reflects truth and evidence.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“It is not uncommon for people to prefer to believe the bullshit that global warming is a hoax than to accept the facts that icebergs are melting, floods and droughts are increasing, the Amazon rain forest is disappearing, and dangerous methane gases are bubbling up from the ocean floor all because global temperatures are rising.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“The degree to which something qualifies as bullshit is inversely proportional to the degree to which the claim is based on truth, genuine evidence, and/or established knowledge.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“I once debated a pro-gun friend about the benefits of better gun control. I did my homework. I found empirical evidence suggesting violence may be triggered by other acts of violence, but guns make the violence worse. I found Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage’s studies conducted over 50 years ago, which showed that the presence of a gun sitting on a table, relative to an object not associated with violence (like a badminton racquet), elicits stronger aggressive responses from participants. I found that more than 32,000 people die and over 67,000 people are injured by firearms each year in the United States. I found that firearm injuries result in over $48 billion in medical and work-loss costs annually. I believe attitudes about firearms should be scientifically driven and evidence-based, but none of these facts mattered to my pro-gun friend! Low-need-for-evidence individuals may portray themselves as concerned with or conveying evidence, but evidence is not actually important to them. Only high-need-for-evidence individuals care about evidence.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“Current research suggests that being duped by bullshit is a result of thinking superficially rather than an inability to think. Essentially, we fail to ask the right questions when presented with bullshit. When people claim that a Moon landing was faked, that a used car will likely get us another 100,000 miles, that essential oils will calm us and provide more restful sleep, that a politician can solve all of our problems, or a Pollyannaish TED Talk speaker will save the world in only 15 minutes, it will be much easier to dispel the bullshit if everyone is asking critical questions. What agenda does the speaker have? Who is providing the evidence? How credible is the speaker? To get people to stop spreading bullshit, misinformation, fake news, and the like, we will have to get comfortable asking bullshitters, How do you know this to be true? To the best of your knowledge, is the claim accurate? What sort of evidence supports your conclusion? If we do not, bullshit will only continue to pile around us while we waste precious opportunities to encourage optimal decision-making by refocusing on reality and evidence.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“There are two major problems with pseudo-profundity. The first is that it masks the real meaning of just about everything. Despite the fact that it is pretentious and annoying, bullshit artists use it because people often accept pseudo-profundity as a substitute for thinking hard and clearly about “the expert’s” message, goals, and directions. The Sokal Hoax Article is a case in point. A professor of mathematics at University College London and a professor of physics at New York University, Alan Sokal found himself increasingly dissatisfied with postmodern cultural scholarship. He decided to test the field’s intellectual rigor by submitting for publication “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a top postmodern cultural studies journal whose editors included luminaries such as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross. Unbeknownst to the editors, Sokal’s manuscript was a hoax. It appeared to be a synthesis of relevant literature, but was instead full of pretentious-sounding, pseudoscientific nonsense. If Sokal’s study had any hypothesis at all, it was that he could get an article, liberally salted with utter nonsense, accepted for publication in a leading cultural studies journal. All Sokal really needed to do was flatter the editors’ ideological preconceptions and ensure that the paper sounded good. The paper was accepted. The editors of Social Text were unable to discern real theory from Sokal’s pseudo-profound bullshit because it made as much sense as other pseudo-profound papers they were publishing in their journal.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“Of all the unlikely people to get mixed up with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Stephen Greenspan is the type of person you’d expect to be immune to investment fraud. With advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins University, he spent his career as a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado studying social incompetence and gullibility. At the time of his retirement, Greenspan had published nearly 100 scientific papers and was well-known in psychology for his book Annals of Gullibility. With interest and expertise in the science of gullibility, shouldn’t Greenspan have recognized that Madoff’s firm was a scam? Yet he too was one of BLMIS’s private investors.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“The framing effect describes a cognitive bias whereby our decisions are influenced by whether the information is framed in a positive or negative light. Common examples of the framing effect are found in how goods are marketed.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“What does the claim mean? How is it meant to be understood? Is there anything unclear, ambiguous or not understood about the claim? How can the claim be best characterised or classified?”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“Interpretion, Analysis, Evaluation, Inference and Self-regulation.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“If wine experts don’t use these things and can’t reliably differentiate between a Clos Pegase Merlot and a Cannonball Merlot, it seems likely that professional wine descriptions will continue to proliferate bullshit. Aside from reading the descriptions, people often assume that the quality of a wine is positively correlated with its price.6 This is why marketers only need to make a wine sound expensive. Like many commodities, wine is a Veblen good. Veblen goods are luxury goods whose prices do not follow the typical laws of supply and demand. They are in demand because they are expensive.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit

“The only way to determine if the used-car dealer was bullshitting or lying to you is to discover his level of concern with the truth. It isn’t the content of a claim that determines its status as a lie or bullshit, but rather what the used-car dealer actually knows about the truth and his degree of concern about it. If the dealer knew the truth, but communicated something other than the truth, then he lied to you, but if he didn’t care at all about the truth, he was bullshitting.”
― John V. Petrocelli, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit