Even experts can be tricked by meaningless babble uttered by a slick BS artist

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/12/even-experts-can-be-tricked-by.html

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So the graduate students stand in for experts?

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Original


Chryslers versions


Rockwells
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Forerunners to the Star trek engineers.

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Well, you do need that inverse trunion bearing to prevent cross-fumbling. Duh.

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I’d say it’s a reasonable stand-in. I know at least one tenured professor who didn’t stay up to date on advances in statistics and will basically agree with anything that has enough jargon in it in a poor attempt to mask that he’s got not idea what people are saying. I’ve also read many, many terrible papers that I suspect passed peer review because they were a mess of clauses and sub-clauses so tangled that I doubt the reviewers had time or inclination to try and interpret them.

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retro encabulator? does it have a samoflange?

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I feel like using psychologists is a bit of a dirty trick. We have so many different terms for the same things, or single terms that mean different things to different people in the field, that obfuscation is incredibly easy. One of my research assistants once asked me the difference between short term memory and working memory, as they suspected it was going to be a test question. Not knowing their instructor’s personal take on the matter, I had little choice but to throw down a smoke bomb* and make a run for it.

*All psych grad students carry smoke bombs to make quick escapes like this, steal excessive amounts of free food, or avoid running into their advisers in the hallway when behind on a project.

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Nothing from Flossaluzitarin?

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I think that’s pronounced @Flossaluzitarin.

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This is fantastic. It hurts my brain because it almost makes some bit of sense and I’m trying to think if I’m just too dumb to figure it out.

Reminds me of the git man page generator. Funny if you know a little bit about git. And hilarious if you know a lot about it.

By the time most people are working on their PhDs, they presumable have a fair amount of expertise in their fields.

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Remodulate the shield frequencies on this post.

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Nobody has posted this yet?

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As part of hazing intake week in college, we attended our first class which turned out to be exactly this kind of bullshit. I fell for it hard, defending the topic against my more clued-in new classmates.

That lesson showed me that I had become (and really still am) habituated to receiving information but only processing it later. I think this had started in AP math class in high school, which felt like the first time I was challenged with a subject I didn’t understand immediately. From then on, I adopted an attitude of “I don’t understand it now, but maybe I’ll understand it later.”, where I turn off the bullshit meter when in presence of a so-called authority figure.

I don’t know how to fix this generally.

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I’d imagine that experts who don’t possess a decent interdisciplinary knowledge base are amongst the easiest to fool.

The Amazon show “Patriot” is full of a number of amazing speeches like this…
https://youtu.be/P5-9Rfrui9A

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I hope so. My Master’s didn’t entitle me to squat.

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Geordi’s on it.

I have never heard of this concept as an official thing and this is wonderful. I am totally going to use this on an engineer and see if they can figure it out without saying anything

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