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I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you under
by jknoepfler 6y ago
I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline - but you might say "yes" anyway, for a myriad of reasons.
Something I find disingenuous in this study is the failure to follow up on competency. "High bullshit index" individuals claim with higher frequency to be able to calculate the petrol consumption of a car, and are confident in their popularity. Are they wrong? Immigrants are more likely to bullshit when they are confronted with language they don't understand - but they are also highly experienced at figuring out things they don't understand after the fact.
I found it queer that the tasks asked about where relatively mathematical, and the domain they used to measure bullshit was also mathematical... if the checklist of "could you find the gcd of two numbers" "could you find all the complex roots of this polynomial" etc. were interpreted as "if you were prompted (in good faith) on a homework assignment to do this task, are you confident you could do it?" (this is a much more ecologically valid situation than being asked to do something meaningless or impossible), then the answer learned through hard experience might correctly be "yes", despite the respondent "not actually knowing what they were talking about".
Food for thought anyway. I think the article takes an exceptionally otherizing stance towards would be bullshitters. (And uses some... hopefully ironic? ... rhetoric. "We all know a bullshitter" is the classic fallacy of appealing to popular belief).
- robocat 6y ago> the high bullshit scores of immigrants I think that statement is far too broad: I can think of some fairly bullshit free cultures, like many Scandinavian countries. I can also think of people from specific religions that I generally find to be bullshitty, versus people from the same country but a different religion that appear to me to be much more honest. Also a lot of people I meet from the USA appear to me to be extremely bullshit oriented compared to New Zealanders... Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people that emigrate or travel to New Zealand, or because I tend to meet businessmen?
- jknoepfler 6y agoDid you read the paper? They literally measure this. I was quoting a stat from the paper. The point of my comment was to think critically about how they interpret their findings, in light of their very own findings.
- a1369209993 6y ago> Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people that emigrate or travel Tangentially to the point, I'm going to hazard a guess that "people who travel to other cultures" are going to be more bullshit-oriented than average, due to factors jknoepfler referenced above, eg "If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline".
- Gibbon1 6y ago> high bullshit scores of immigrants I'm culturally from the US west coast. I have an instinct that directly asking someone from a face culture to admit ignorance is 'sensitive'
- rurban 6y agoI'm from a non bullshit culture. They first greek word you learn is "den katalava", do not understand. (δεν κατάλαβα) The 2nd phrase you learn is "den xero", do not know. (δεν ξέρω) Some cultures prefer to be polite and therefore lie, some cultures prefer to tell the truth.
- hdfjkghdfjg4 6y agoA shame to see this comment greyed out for defending immigrants.