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by xikrib 1115 days ago
Maybe I'm taking this too seriously, but the authors seem preoccupied with airing their own frustration with the views of Deepak Chopra. Using such an author as a data source is distracting because he writes about a sort of spiritual thinking that - based on the tone of the article - the authors presumably do not practice themselves.

I would be interested to expand the author's definition of bullshit to account for instances where the 'bullshitee' has insufficient knowledge about a topic. In the same way a true statement about theoretical physics would be indistinguishable from bullshit to anyone not trained in the subject.

I found this paper close to touching on a method for understanding truthiness in generated text, but falling short into comedy.

1 comments

This is a fair take - ie, the authors are saying what their readers want to hear using some pseudo-statistics.

In this sense, the authors are bullshitting their readers - by telling them what they want to hear (as any politician might)