Why people think total nonsense is really deep

OrbitalDawn

OrbitalDawn

Ulysses Everett McGill
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...use-total-nonsense-for-something-really-deep/

Words can be inspiring, even when they're arranged into vague, fancy-sounding sequences that seem deep but say nothing.

Take the sentence "wholeness quiets infinite phenomena." It's complete and utter nonsense. In fact, it was randomly generated by a Web site. And many might have seen this immediately, or realized it after thinking it through.

But the truth is that a surprising number of people would likely have called the bogus statement profound.

"A lot of people are prone to what I call pseudo-profound bulls***," said Gordon Pennycook, a doctorate student at the University of Waterloo who studies why some people are more easily duped than others.

"Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" was one of many randomly generated sentences Pennycook, along with a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, used in a new four-part study put together to gauge how receptive people are to nonsense. Pennycook used a Web site -- which refers to itself with an expletive for the sentences it produces -- to generate the language samples.

In the first part, they asked nearly 300 hundred participants to rate the profundity of randomly generated sentences on a scale from 1 to 5. Not only did the statements receive an average score of 2.6, meaning that they viewed them as somewhat profound, but a quarter of participants gave them a score of 3 or higher, indicating that they considered them to be profound or even very profound.

In the second, Pennycook used real-world examples of pseudo-profound phrases, plucking tweets from Deepak Chopra's Twitter account that others have called vague or empty (like: "nature is a self-regulating ecosystem of awareness), along with the randomly generated sentences used in the first exercise. And the results were virtually the same. "They basically thought the tweets were just as profound as the randomly generated sentences," said Pennycook. "So they were equally bad at seeing the B.S. in both."
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We live in the age of made-up words, for example 'micro-aggression' & 'firepool' are both quite profound.
 
But isn't it more a case that profundity's crevices are mere echoes of existential quandaries?
 
Happens on this forum all the time. People posting walls of text that don't really say much, with a few choice words thrown in, to sound smarter...
 
wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
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Re-state it thus: Wholeness encompasses infinite phenomena.

Meaning that although phenomena are infinite, there is still a sense in which infinity can be encapsulated by a notion of 'wholeness'. That picture of wholeness 'quiets the noise' of infinite phenomena - of universes dying, of children laughing, of apples falling. The wholeness that encapsulates infinite phenomena is the sublime state of being.

And in much the same way we can regard the Self.

Though we may consist of infinite phenomena - of thoughts, worries, wisdom & woes - by transcending the fragments and seeing ourselves as whole - we can quiet the infinite phenomena of our being and accept ourselves as the beautiful whole creatures we are.

j/k :p
 
^^^ :)

On the topic of long words to impress:
Nevertheless, the Latinate invasion did leave genuine peculiarities in our language. For instance, it was here that the idea that ‘big words’ are more sophisticated got started. In most languages of the world, there is less of a sense that longer words are ‘higher’ or more specific. In Swahili, Tumtazame mbwa atakavyofanya simply means ‘Let’s see what the dog will do.’ If formal concepts required even longer words, then speaking Swahili would require superhuman feats of breath control.

The English notion that big words are fancier is due to the fact that French and especially Latin words tend to be longer than Old English ones – end versus conclusion, walk versus ambulate.

Source
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saor said:
Re-state it thus: Wholeness encompasses infinite phenomena.

Meaning that although phenomena are infinite, there is still a sense in which infinity can be encapsulated by a notion of 'wholeness'. That picture of wholeness 'quiets the noise' of infinite phenomena - of universes dying, of children laughing, of apples falling. The wholeness that encapsulates infinite phenomena is the sublime state of being.

And in much the same way we can regard the Self.

Though we may consist of infinite phenomena - of thoughts, worries, wisdom & woes - by transcending the fragments and seeing ourselves as whole - we can quiet the infinite phenomena of our being and accept ourselves as the beautiful whole creatures we are.

j/k
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I am highly intoxicated by the exuberance of your verbosity!

Heard that little gem in a movie once..
 
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