On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit

[TheRealJoeFish]

One of the main upshots of the paper (or at least the first five pages I've been able to get through at work) is that it takes some mental processing work to parse or comprehend a statement, it takes additional work to determine whether the statement needs higher scrutiny, and then it takes more work to determine if the statement is bullshit.  Basically, it's a three step process, and a lot of people are too mentally unprepared or lazy to go beyond step one.

That's overly generous. I've seen plenty who utterly fail to grasp step 1.

They address that too! Basically, they say people who aren't good at logical reasoning, when they encounter a vacuous statement, are predisposed to unconsciously assume their failure to understand is a problem with them rather than the statement. 

Essentially, when people who are skilled at rational thinking see a statement they don't comprehend, they remain neutral about its truth value until they determine whether there is enough content to make a truth value at all, whereas people who are unskilled at rational thinking assume the truth of the statement (because they subconsciously feel it is more likely the statement is true and they do not have the capacity to evaluate that truth, rather than the statement itself is lacking of content), and then sort of bootstrap the assumption of truth into an assumption that there is content in the statement.