Science

So "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" is bullshit. Does it mean that people who bullshit "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" are easier to bullshit? (This gets recursive.)

Okay, I'm being cheeky. Serious now: I found a pre-print of the paper. Also make sure to read the supporting material, even if just for fun - some of the bullshit quotes used in the study are hilarious.

[from the paper] recent research has suggested that bullshitting and lying, while clearly related, are psychologically distinguishable constructs (Littrell et al., 2020). For example, liars show a stronger negative association with self-regard and a stronger positive association with lie acceptability than bullshitters (Littrell et al., 2020).

I wonder how well the distinction would hold cross-linguistically. "Strong" Sapir-Whorf might be bullshit, but the weak version is worth checking.

My hypothesis is that the sort of people who'd engage on persuasive bullshit cares less about truth value of the statements, and that's what giving them a hard time asserting the truth value of what others say. In the meantime, evasive bullshitters are already using an evasive approach because they don't want to say an untrue statement.

So the notion of "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" is false? 🤔

Maybe because they're naive enough to assume that just because they're lying bastards they can tell when other people are.

I really hope this impressiv and "scientific sounding" headline is more than just another example of the named effect. ;-)

In a series of studies conducted with over 800 participants from the US and Canada, the researchers examined the relations between participants’ self-reported engagement in both types of BSing and their ratings of how profound, truthful, or accurate they found pseudo-profound and pseudo-scientific statements and fake news headlines.

Selfreporting. And this 800 participants, where are they from? Students?

They say "never shit a shitter", but apparently it should be "always shit a shitter".