On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
One of the simple ways to detect it is just to notice the warm glow such things give you, and become suspicious of it.<p>In general, a statement has information to the extent that it can exclude some things, preferably quite a lot of things. Truth is exponentially exclusive versus false statements, e.g., there&#x27;s an exponential number of ways of combining letters and spaces but my legal name is only and exactly one of them.<p>Take the statement &quot;We&#x27;re all connected.&quot; In the absence of a specific definition of connected, that may feel warm and fuzzy, but it&#x27;s also vacuous. It excludes nothing. There is no practically-meaningful opposing statement &quot;we&#x27;re all disconnected from each other in every possible meaning of &#x27;disconnected&#x27;.&quot; Clearly if nothing else we are all gravitationally coupled to each other... and I don&#x27;t mean that as a joke at all, but to highlight just how vacuous these statements can be.<p>By contrast consider &quot;We&#x27;re all presently able to telepathically communicate with every other person in the world.&quot; This nails down a very specific claim... specific enough to be false.<p>A key indicator of this sort of contentless statement is when people aggressively refuse to define their terms because they just want to bask in the warm glow of the statement.<p>That is a relatively external and objective read on such statements. It is true that as you age and learn about the world and ponder these statements, many such statements may take on new dimensions and new depth. To my mind, this is a process of acquiring a deeper definition of various terms, and typically, these can not be communicated through normal human language. Some people see this as a very profound statement; I see it rather as a contingent statement on the basis of the nature of human language. I can infuse &quot;We&#x27;re all connected&quot; with some relatively profound meaning of my own, where I see the connections as metaphorically more like how an ecosystem is all connected together. (Actually, I can infuse it with multiple distinct true meanings, which itself is part of the reason the 3 words on their own aren&#x27;t really that interesting.) I can&#x27;t really convey the idea I have in my head to you right now, because English is not adequate to convey it. But I think another hypothetical language could do it, it&#x27;s just not clear what it would be. It is difficult for human language to transcend the statistical average of the ability of its speakers to think precisely, which is one of the primary reasons we end up with so many jargons as subcommunities find they need more precision in certain areas.<p>(I am perhaps biased by the fact that my day job is literally to convey certain concepts in precision <i>far</i> beyond what English can do, as are most of us here. Between &quot;A user should be able to change their password&quot; and the substantial code involved to actually do that safely and correctly is a great deal of precision, not generally expressible in English. However, sadly, even Rust is not truly capable of expressing what I meant by &quot;We&#x27;re all connected&quot; in the previous paragraph, even if it <i>is</i> capable of ensuring that any such expression would be memory-safe, which, as is widely acknowledged in philosophical circles, is a very important element of any philosophical opinion.)<p>A consequence of all of this is that there is a lot of statements that I would agree I can infuse with interesting and deep meanings, but the statements don&#x27;t necessarily contain that information themselves. In the case of my sample statement, as I mentioned my most natural infusion of meaning into &quot;We&#x27;re all connected&quot; resembles an ecosystem. Someone else may see it as a statement of universal brotherhood which in their internal definition has an almost direct implication that we should all be nicer to each other because when we hurt each other we are also hurting ourselves. (And even <i>that</i> English statement has multiple deeper interpretations; there&#x27;s clearly a very mystical meaning many might use, but then there&#x27;s also the observation that simply putting more bad stuff out into the world increases the odds of me getting bad stuff myself. A direct example is that me slugging you rather sharply increases the chances that I will get slugged myself in the short term. And note there&#x27;s no particular contradiction between these two expansions.)<p>This makes a huge variety of mistakes easy. I can look at a situation, nod sagely and say &quot;We&#x27;re all connected&quot;, and you can agree, but it turns out we mean extremely different things. We can even both be profoundly correct in some manner. Harshly, but from what I can see quite fairly, it is very easy for people to pick up some slogan like &quot;We&#x27;re all connected&quot;, see that other people they look up to seem to think it contains some wisdom, and simply fake a reaction to it to conform to a perceived crowd and its leaders. And from my own experience I can say as well that you may have a relatively interesting understanding of it and think you get it, only to get it even more deeply in the future with further refined definitions and understanding.