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Pearls of wisdom
A DECADE after Harry Frankfurst’s celebrated treatise On Bullshit, we are finally rewarded with a scientific investigation of the subject.
“On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit” is a in which Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues attempt to identify behaviours that render people susceptible to nonsense.
The authors define bullshit as a statement that “implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth”. To form a Bullshit Receptivity scale, they used satirical sites such as (a random phrase…
