Home > Author > John V. Petrocelli
1 " The framing effect describes a cognitive bias whereby our decisions are influenced by whether the information is framed in a positive or negative light. Common examples of the framing effect are found in how goods are marketed. "
― John V. Petrocelli , The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit
2 " Interpretion, Analysis, Evaluation, Inference and Self-regulation. "
3 " Critical thinking is a learned process of deliberation, fact checking, and self reflection used to comprehend and appropriately evaluate information in order to decide what to believe or what to do. "
4 " The only way to determine if the used-car dealer was bullshitting or lying to you is to discover his level of concern with the truth. It isn’t the content of a claim that determines its status as a lie or bullshit, but rather what the used-car dealer actually knows about the truth and his degree of concern about it. If the dealer knew the truth, but communicated something other than the truth, then he lied to you, but if he didn’t care at all about the truth, he was bullshitting. "
5 " If wine experts don’t use these things and can’t reliably differentiate between a Clos Pegase Merlot and a Cannonball Merlot, it seems likely that professional wine descriptions will continue to proliferate bullshit. Aside from reading the descriptions, people often assume that the quality of a wine is positively correlated with its price.6 This is why marketers only need to make a wine sound expensive. Like many commodities, wine is a Veblen good. Veblen goods are luxury goods whose prices do not follow the typical laws of supply and demand. They are in demand because they are expensive. "
6 " The degree to which something qualifies as bullshit is inversely proportional to the degree to which the claim is based on truth, genuine evidence, and/or established knowledge. "
7 " What does the claim mean? How is it meant to be understood? Is there anything unclear, ambiguous or not understood about the claim? How can the claim be best characterised or classified? "
