How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.

I cannot give you example for the first sentence (because it is bullshit), but for the second sentence, I can imagine a person who tries a lot of new things and makes a lot of mistakes, presumably because they do not know how to do it. The way the sentence is phrased is just a reversed implication of that.

Note that the "profound" sentence can still be wrong or false or even unfalsifiable statement. The point is that you can assign meaning to it, build a mental model around it.

>> How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.

I think this is a bit like Kolmogorov complexity - just because you can't find a concrete example of a statement, doesn't mean that there isn't one, only that there isn't one that you know of.

It's also very hard to tell whether something is a concrete example of a natural language statement, especially when that statement is metaphorical.

Finally- I'm pretty sure I can think of statements that would map to concrete examples that could be identified as either bullshit or profound truths, depending on who you ask or who is making the statement. For instance, if I say that "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge" - that could easily be applied to mystical knowledge (probably bullshit) and to scientific knowledge (probably not quite bullshit).

If there isn't a concrete example of the statement that you can discover, then it's up to the person who uttered the phrase to give you one. If they can't do that, they are likely bullshitting.

For example, I can say "All holomorphic functions are analytic", and the fact that you cannot come up with a concrete example, or even that you don't understand the meaning of the sentence (if you don't know anything about complex analysis) still doesn't mean that it is bullshit.

Metaphors are not a problem; you can also explain them in the above sense.

> "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge"

Different people might interpret "hidden knowledge" differently, that's true. But then I would say that whether or not the statement is objectively bullshit or profound depends on the interpretation of whoever uttered the phrase was using.

So if it was uttered by Deepak Chopra, it is probably bullshit. If it was uttered by Carl Sagan, it is probably profound.

I mean, this problem is not specific to bullshit/profound statements, but to language in general. For example, common objection to evolution is "evolution is just a theory". Here, the word "theory" can take on two different meanings, and the truthfulness of the sentence depends on the meaning that is assigned to the word "theory".

This only poses potential problem for the study, where the statements should be selected so that the confusion due to usual (assumed) meaning of words is minimized.

What you say seems to go hand in hand with the article's conclusion.

It seems quite reasonable that if you are able to easily see concrete examples of statements for those (and only those) where others can do so as well, then this would indicate a general alignment with the wider society and also be correlated with prosocial behavior.

In essence, if you're given a subjective, metaphorical task where the "correct answers" aren't entirely logical, then this enables evaluation if your subjectivity and your metaphors are aligned with the social consensus or not. As this task is very easy for some people and not so for others, then this seems informative about some objective property or ability of the test takers, even if "bullshit-sensitivity" IMHO isn't a very accurate name for that property; there are some people for which statement #2 is clearly not bullshit and there are some people for which it's debatable, and without labelling one group as correct or wrong, it illustrates a difference between two different groups of people.

Bullshit isn't EVEN wrong... its meaningless quackery that uses words people who don't understand find important (intelligence signalling). Profundity is in the eye of the beholder, and I may sometimes argue about specifics, but like stereotypes it has some value even in refutation or outside of its field...F=ma!

There are certainly statements that are easy to identify as bullshit or not; the problem is what happens with the probably much larger set that's somewhere in the middle.

I think the author meant that "profound" is something that takes a lot of thought to understand, whereas "bullshit" is something that has no meaning.If you find a profound meaning in it, you're "bullshit-insensitive".

While the second sentence isn't very profound, it does have a meaning and it's used as an example because most people will understand it.

A statement can take a lot of thinking to understand because it's carrying some deep truth for which we lack natural insight- or, just because it has no meaning and therefore cannot be understood.

I've heard many different variations of the second sentence, from many different people but, again, popular opinion about what constitutes bullshit or not is not a very objective criterion.

I mean more that the paper compares meaningless statements with difficult but meaningful statements. Rather than the common term of "bullshit" meaning lies or something disagreeable.

The author probably should have defined "bullshit" more accurately, but the paper seems to be purposely abstruse.