People who frequently try to impress or persuade others with misleading exaggerations and distortions are themselves more likely to be fooled by impressive-sounding misinformation, new research from the University of Waterloo shows. The researchers found that people who frequently engage in “persuasive bullshitting” were actually quite poor at identifying it. Specifically,
Some of those BS things are actually pretty difficult. I mean, the “motivational quotes” sound like nonsense, but the fake science things don’t sound especially fake to me (who has almost no understanding of physics).
Even the headlines didn’t sound especially outrageous, given the kinds of headlines we can easily find today. Though anything “serious”, I’d probably fact check or look for a more reliable source, lol
The trick is to look at what the paradigmatic discourse within a Cartesian frame of reference that includes co-articulation can reveal about the locutionary force.
[/bullshit]…sorry, I couldn’t resist. Serious now: there’s no fool-proof way to detect bullshit, but often you can smell it by analysing the words being used, and see if they convey something coherent. Specially if you can look for the meaning of words that you don’t know.
And, if you don’t know the topic, you can get a good guess on the meaning of the words based on other things that you might know.