9 ms·
BlaBlaMeter detects how much bullshit is in your text
- brittohalloran 14y agoGreat idea, but show me what in my text is triggering it, and have some "example" buttons.
- nbartlomiej 14y agoYou might like http://nbartlomiej.github.com/lisense/ http://nbartlomiej.github.com/lisense/ then. It my old pet project; like BlaBlaMeter, but for licenses. I still hope to experiment with the idea of improving licenses in future.
- jentulman 14y agoYeah, would be nice to the see the text again with a BS heatmap highlighting the text.
- 001sky 14y agoA multi-colored 3d topology of bullshit would really make it hit home
- shanelja 14y agoAny chance of an overview of the algorithm you're using to filter out the text? My thinking is you are measuring word count versus commonly used marketing or political jargon count, but that's probably too simple.
- DallaRosa 14y agoI'd guess so. Or maybe they compiled a corpus of bullshit text (scientific articles, PR and political texts), created a little statistical model and are using that to check the level of bullshit of your text.
- shanelja 14y agoMost unusual... "Politics are great, come buy our new, brand spanking awesome banana phone, apple, steve jobs, cripplingly epic banana phone. Just great phones, with bananas, no apples to be found here. Samsung can suck on our banana phone. Android is better than iOS." "Your text: 251 characters, 43 words Bullshit Index :0.03 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English."
- DallaRosa 14y agoYou wrote a lot of bullshit but your text looks pretty normal from a vocabulary standard. looking a bit more to the website you'll see that what it calls bullshit english is that pattern often used in scientific articles or law texts (and president speeches) where they seem to be saying a lot of really wow stuff but all you're really left in the end as a big "?" cause you couldn't get half of what the person said.
- slashcom 14y agoHere's a few things I've gleamed from experimenting with it: - It uses a unigram language model. You can take the same text, randomly permute the words, and you get the same score. This means it also can't be using things like POS tagging, phrases, etc. - It normalizes words by making all letters lowercase. The exact same text in all upper case has the same score. - The score is eventually normalized by the length of the text. The same text copied multiple times gets the same score. - It does not form a valid probability distribution, as someone's managed to get some 1.16's. This makes me believe it's not a Naive Bayes classifier giving you the P(Bullshit|Text). Though this is what I originally thought it would be.
- icegreentea 14y agoIt is that simple. Looks like they assign a BS level to words, and then take some sort of average bullshit level amongst all words. Word order doesn't matter as slashcom says. For example, if you take the score from the Oracle Pricing blurb posted by BitMistro, and change 'strategies' to 'goals', you drop down to 0.8 or so. If you add an extra random 'strategy' somewhere, it bumps up to 1.4 or something. I actually suspect a bug on their pair for strategies... probably a decimal error when building to BS level tables. But similar things happen with other 'bullshity' words, just to a lesser degree.
- slashcom 14y agoIt should also be noted that on about 400 short texts (~300 words each), it did not correlate with the Flesh-Kinaid readability measure at all. So it's not measuring something like average word length or syllable counts. But it's not QUITE a true lexicon, as it handles Out-Of-Vocabulary words quite strangely. If you use as input text: "PR-Experts, politicians, ad writers or scientists need to be strong here! BlaBlaMeter unmasks without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text. A useful tool for everyone involved in writing! Simply copy your text into the white field and check your writing style. It works with english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off). For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences." Then you get 0.16. If you replace the last word 'sentences' with 'strategy' you go up to 0.44. However, if you change the last word to 'sentstrategyences' you get 0.47. Try it: you can basically insert 'strategy' inside ANY word and really raise your score. Actually, if you just insert "strateg" anywhere inside the text, it goes up massively. So I actually think it's just doing string search counts over a lexicon.
- icegreentea 14y agoAs yes, you're right. If you insert random 'izations' into your text, your BS meter goes up as well. It also has a hardon for 'activity'.
- throwaway1979 14y agoHilarious! I plugged in some paragraphs from press releases and it was spot on. I also appreciated the "or Scientist" part ... simply awesome! "Bullshit Index :0.64 This reeks. I bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone."
- impendia 14y agoScientist? I put in a page or so from a scientific paper I recently wrote and got 0.19.
- sp332 14y agoYou have the causality backwards.
- throwaway1979 14y agoHeh .. try putting in the first para from a scientific paper. I bet 10 karma points that this will have higher BS content than the rest. Similarly, the last para of the intro is also almost always content free. Note: I'm a scientist too ... good to poke fun at ourselves, eh? :)
- slantyyz 14y agoIt would be neat if someone integrated algorithms like this into discussion forum software.
- flexie 14y agoI tried with Paul Ryan's speech at the RNC. Here's what it said: Your text: 15000 characters, 2645 words Bullshit Index :0.13 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English. Does that mean the algorithms work?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- citricsquid 14y agoObamas AMA answers came out between 0.10 and 0.30! http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama
- fwr 14y agoThat's the first thing I've checked, I'm a little disappointed.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoHoly Cr*p - The President actually did an AMA. I cannot imagine our Prime Minister replying to an email. Edit: oh its happening today - I thought it was old news and no-one had told me. Apologies for the exclamation marks now gone.
- droob 14y agoGood companion to Paul Ford's Passivator: http://www.ftrain.com/ThePassivator.html http://www.ftrain.com/ThePassivator.html
- mikle 14y agoMy blog posts (http://sveder.com/blog http://sveder.com/blog) are between .18-.22 so I feel relieved. Great idea, and like everyone else I'd like to know where I fail too.
- grabeh 14y agoThe main reason I posted was in the hope of triggering discussion over the method used to analyse the text. I've seen users getting a lower score simply by separating out a block of text into numbered paragraphs which would seem to point to quite a simplistic method. http://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/cutting-down-on-the-bla-bla/ http://ipdraughts.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/cutting-down-on-t...
- DallaRosa 14y agoI'll withstand my statement: model based on a corpus of PR, scholar, licenses and the like texts. If they are into real statistical NLP. Or just esthetic rules + word dictionary.
- slashcom 14y agoIf I were to make the software, the corpus of PR, licenses, etc. would be the way I go. But "they did it statistically" doesn't answer the question "what is the model?" There are many different statistical models one could use. My other post has a few things we've figured out. But I'm starting to think a rule-based lexicon isn't out of the question, given these >1 scores on some texts.
- primitur 14y agoI'd like to use it as a plugin for email, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and other such things of that nature .. ;)
- BitMastro 14y agoI got an astonishing 1.13 from http://www.oracle.com/uk/corporate/pricing/index.html http://www.oracle.com/uk/corporate/pricing/index.html :D
- shell0x 14y agoI tried the german version of it and pasted a SAP article, which got a score of 1.34. They mostly talk bullshit, but the article wasn't bad to understand imho, so I think the algorithm needs some work. The text was: "Möchten Sie SAP-Software vor Ort installieren oder über die Cloud darauf zugreifen? Wir bieten in jedem Fall umfassende Services, zugeschnitten auf Ihre individuellen Anforderungen. Wir verfügen über eines der größten Expertenteams weltweit. Unsere qualifizierten Mitarbeiter beraten Sie gern bei der Konzeptionierung, Implementierung und Optimierung Ihrer Systemlandschaft. Profitieren Sie innerhalb kürzester Zeit von Ihrer SAP-Lösung."
- BCM43 14y agoHeh, pasted in the benefits here: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/061863.html http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/061863.html and got 1.26.
- yskchu 14y agoTried Churchill's "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech; got 0.08 BS index; I think it works :)
- derrida 14y agoDerrida, Chapter 2 'Of Grammatology' >Bullshit Index :0.26 Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit' some indications ... I'd say this thing is broken.
- makmanalp 14y agoYou're just bitter that that era of philosopher in general used an artificially complicated writing style, complete with invented terminology, that borders bullshit :)
- derrida 14y agoI'm just pointing out it is broken. Finnegan's Wake, Chapter 2, Book 1. > Bullshit Index :0.11 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English. definitely broken Or perhaps it's a feature and it can pick out philosophical / artistic 'bullshit' from PR 'bullshit'. Quote for people not familiar with 'Finnegan's Wake' > And aroud the lawn the rann it rann and this is the rann that Hosty made. Spoken. Boyles and Cahills, Skerretts and Pritchards, viersefied and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney. Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him Mike, some dub him Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn. Some apt him Arth, some bapt him Barth, Coll, Noll, Soll, Will, Weel, Wall but I parse him Persse O'Reilly else he's called no name at all. To- gether. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty for he's the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king of all ranns. Have you here? (Some ha) Have we where? (Some hant) Have you hered? (Others do) Have we whered (Others dont) It's cumming, it's brumming! The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass crash. The(klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrotty- graddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot!)
- shardling 14y agoYou have a weird definition of 'bullshit' if you think that counts. Anyway, I'd assume it's looking for certain 'filler' words and phrases that get used a lot when writing BS.
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- lucaspiller 14y agoI copied in a Daily Mail article and it only gave me 0.12. I think your algorithm needs work...
- joelthelion 14y agoIt would be much better if it could highlight bullshit sections.
- d4n3 14y agoIt would be even better if it replaced the bullshit sections with "bla bla".
- ToesByNoon 14y agoTwitter's latest dev statement got a .42
- slantyyz 14y agoI just pasted some text from a random TechCrunch article relating to Spotify and got this: Your text: 847 characters, 145 words Bullshit Index :0.56 Something's fishy. Obviously you want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so: who would understand it?
- tzaman 14y agoApparently you're not the only one to try TechCrunch first - I did exactly the same thing after clicking the link. It appears our internal bullshit meters work just fine as well :)
- slantyyz 14y agoAfter that, I pasted in an excerpt from PandoDaily and it got a marginally higher score on the BS meter.
- tzaman 14y agowhile I read TechCrunch from time to time, I never visit PandoDaily. Stopped after I saw Sarah Lacy's charade with Zuck on YouTube.
- vignesh_vs_in 14y agoI tried with my own blog post, good to know its not full of bullshit
- nayanga 14y ago"english text up to 15.000 characters (overhead will be cut off)", did I read it as 15 characters ? Bullshit
- donohoe 14y agoRandom articles: TechCrunch: 0.42 ("Amazon Wants Everyone To Know The Kindle Fire Is Sold Out") Paul Ryan's RNC speech: 0.14 NYTimes: 0.11 ("Storm’s Winds Slow as It Exits Southern Louisiana") Obviously its an apples and oranges comparison here but interesting (to me anyway) nonetheless
- tzaman 14y agoTried PG's Writing and speaking article. 0.1 bullshit index, which is almost zero :)
- geogra4 14y agoI used the Potsmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ ) And got scores of 0.35-0.45
- kitsune_ 14y agoPresident's Obama's AMA answers score 0.21 (Your text shows some indications of 'bullshit'-English, but is still within an acceptable range.)
- nhebb 14y agoI tried that too, along with Paul Ryan's speech (which got 0.14 - Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'). Then, I tried the copy on my landing page and got a 0.25. It's shameful to realize that I'm a bigger bullshitter than two politicians.
- jbooth 14y agoIf you brazenly lie using strong phrases without any weasel words, it'll come across as not being 'bullshit' grammatically. I don't think the software has a fact checker.
- gulbrandr 14y agoI got 1.24 from Vmware: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/index.html http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/index.html
- abarringer 14y agoI just tried some text from one of our corporate announcements. Seems accurate. 0.8 This reeks. We bet you're a PR-Expert, Politician, Consultant or Scientist. If there is a message, it's unlikely it will reach anyone. Maybe you should spend less effort on trying to impress somebody.
- vog 14y agoJust for fun I ran quite a few Martin Fowler's articles through the BlaBlaMeter. On some of them, the "Bullshit Index" is unexpectedly large: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html > Bullshit Index: 0.31 – Your text shows indications of 'bullshit'-English. It's still ok for PR or advertising purposes, but more critical audiences may be skeptical. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PhoenixServer.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PhoenixServer.html > Bullshit Index: 0.4 – Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoI'm writing a story; its a 0.12, acceptable.
- skeltoac 14y agoThe text of the site itself scores a surprisingly low 0.14: "Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English." This is not a useful tool because it does not define or point to the problems in the text.
- brianjyee 14y agoIt would be nice if they gave even the smallest hint of what they're measuring.
- ff0066mote 14y ago"I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow, drinking in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me." --- Your text: 130 characters, 28 words Bullshit Index :0.05 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.
- ff0066mote 14y agoI was simply demonstrating, as everyone else in this thread is, that the tool doesn't match one's intution of what is bullshit.
- verisimilidude 14y ago"I am a beautiful flower. I sway in the breeze of my meadow. I drink in the sunshine. I love the little bees who come to visit me." --- Your text: 129 characters, 29 words Bullshit Index :0 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English. BlaBlaMeter prefers an extra word over a comma. Makes sense given the goal here.
- atestu 14y agoMaybe this plays a role: > For a meaningful result we recommend a minimum length of 5 sentences.
- tokenadult 14y agoMy longest FAQ for HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4270768 got "Your text: 8044 characters, 1160 words Bullshit Index :0.17 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English." I too would like to know what the model is for the online ratings. Has there been a validation study of the model? AFTER EDIT: Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html (which is the first writing of his that I ever read) appears to reach the maximum length (by character count) that the program will evaluate, and comes out like this: "Your text: 15000 characters, 2698 words Bullshit Index :0.09 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English." Maybe Paul's procedure of having friends look over his essays and give suggestions helps cut out the bullshit.
- laserDinosaur 14y agoI pasted in the Time Cube website and only got a 0.12.
- kruffin 14y agoIt doesn't detect crazy; maybe it scores higher in one of the other corners of the cube.
- wiedzmin 14y agoI ran a few Wikipedia articles through it. They unsurprisingly shows little signs of 'bullshit'. I am surprised by the rating for Arch though. It doesn't read like PR/Marketing to me. Wikipedia Page - Article, Talk: IBM Watson - 23,20 Ron Paul - 22,11 Slackware - 35,28 SOPA - 34, 18 Arch Linux - 53,18 Witcher 2 - 15,12
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bilbo0s 14y agoBarack Obama's Inaugural: 0.18 Ryan's RNC Speech: 0.14 Lincoln (Gettysburg): 0.09 Lincoln (Second Inaugural): 0.09 MLK (I Have A Dream): 0.08 (Lowest of any Political text I tried) Someone else said Churchill got a 0.08, but I didn't actually try the unaltered text for myself. BUT John Donne: 0
- vavb 14y agoI broke it! I got a 0.07 (which is the lowest I've managed to get) with: "Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you." If that wasn't bullshit I don't know what is.
- finin 14y agoI tried this on Paul Ryan's RNC address from last night, Barack Obama's innaugarel address, and a recent IEEE TKDE journal article. It gave bullshit measures of 0.15, 0.13 and 0.25, respectively. :-(
- selectout 14y agoInteresting to look at Privacy Policies in here. Google's policy had a slightly more bullshit leaning side than the average document.
- thewarrior 14y agoI think that this works by calculating something called the Gunning Fog index , ie the no. Of words in a sentence with more Syllables than usual .
- mdlthree 14y agoI tried past cover letters for jobs and they all scored in the 0.5-0.6 range. This makes sense since I AM trying to sell myself in an honest but tailored way. Does this reveal a flaw in my writing style or in the purpose of cover letters in the hiring process? Is it even possible for a cover letter to score low on a bullshit scale?
- jschulenklopper 14y agoJust tried to same with a recent cover letter, scoring 0.44. I wouldn't worry, although you (and me) can always try to bring it to a more down-to-earth level, making text easier and more pleasant to read. Unfortunately, a job application isn't the right domain for some scientific analysis on correlation between bullshit-measurements and interview invitations, if you're really interested in the job :-)
- originalcvk 14y ago"We use innovative cloud-based patent-pending technologies to leverage synergies between verticals. In order to facilitate the maximum return on investment, we hyperfocus on execution and delivery. We find our clients often fail to think outside the box, but with our proprietary technologies we help to identify action items that directly impact the bottom line." Bullshit Index: 0.46 Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text. Pretty good figuring it's under the 5 sentence recommendation.
- shardling 14y agoNice, the abstract to my thesis gets a 0.5[1] The actual content parts hover around 0.16 (although I only tried segments without any equations). It makes me wonder what sort of results you'd get if you plotted this BS metric vs. page in a full length book. 1. "You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text."
- ColinWright 14y agoJust thought I'd share: Your text: 2418 characters, 451 words Bullshit Index :0.05 Your text shows no or marginal indications of 'bullshit'-English.
- instakill 14y agoBest use case to test it with: http://startupista.com/corporate-bullshit-generator/ http://startupista.com/corporate-bullshit-generator/
- raesene2 14y agoI wonder if it's possible to get it to higher than 0.5. I just tried it with some patent gibberish and it only made that score. -- "This project is a blue sky implementation of a cloud based virtual paradigm which really shifts the boundries of our connected world. Using patent pending technology to accelerate your business, we use full-stack web-scale systems built on noSQL databases to drive clicks. And your security is safe with us. We use military grade encryption to protect all your data at rest."
- ChuckMcM 14y agoTop story 'Amit on Grids' as I write this scored a .69 on the first paragraph.
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- egypturnash 14y agoI tried it on the front page of Time Cube. Bullshit Index :0.12 Your text shows only a few indications of 'bullshit'-English. I get the feeling this tool is only testing for a very narrow definition of bullshit.
- AllTheThings 14y agoJoel on Software's "Software Inventory"[1] gets a 0.22 rating. I'm a big fan of Joel on Software and am curious as to how this model evaluates "bullshit". 1. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html
- clwoodson 14y agoWhatever algorithm it uses thinks George W Bush and Sarah Palin lace their speeches with less bullshit than Winston Churchill.
- DanielRibeiro 14y agoMeta index: the page itself has 0.14 bulshit index...
- kephra 14y agoIt would be nice, if http://www.blablameter.de/fragen_und_antworten.html http://www.blablameter.de/fragen_und_antworten.html is also available in English. The result is that non-German speakers are standing in the dark, wondering what methodology is behind that software. It might be even difficult to translate the concept to English, as some terms and ideas like http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalstil http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalstil are missing in the (restricted) English language. German is so much more elaborated, its a language of philosophers ;-)
- haeikou 14y ago* What's a good BlaBla Meter result? High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3 * Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0? This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits. * What is the highest index value? Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even. * Does Google use a similar algorithm? We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values. * How does BlaBla Meter work? BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;) [1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject. * Why does my scientific text have such a high index? Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue. * My mindless text gets a good score, why? BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise. * My text is wrongly devalued! As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices. * But humans read texts completely differently ... When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't! * What happens with entered texts? Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.
- 001sky 14y agoHow did Reddit's AMA do? NOT BAD! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451328 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451328 - full text http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451586 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451586 - summary text 4. Small-Business tax breaks - [major bullshit] 0.5 [a] 1. Space Race - [PR level bullshit] 0.33 7. Money in Politics - [Some bullshit] 0.28 2. Internet Freedom - [some bullshit] 0.23 10. Work/Life Balance - [little bullshit] 0.16 9. Jobs / recent grads - [little bullshit] 0.16 6. Most Difficult Decision/afghanistan - [No Bullshit] 0.07 [Un-analyzable] 3. Favorite Basketball Player - too short 8. White House Beer Recipe - too short 5. First Activity on Nov 7 - too short [a]"Are you sure that you have a real message, and if so: who would understand it?"