A PhD student from Canada has recently created a website which automatically generates completely meaningless sentences that just happen to sound profound.
Check it out and you will see that the phrases you’ll find are very similar to the ones used by actual New-Age charlatans. It’s interesting to see how these guys are making millions just by tweeting sentences that even a computer could come up with.
but suppose a mathematician publishes proofs, and to mock them a person creates a generator of random symbols that superficially look similar to the proofs of the mathematician.
Excellent! Total enlightenment at the click of one single button:
Self-actualization is the knowledge of presence, and of us.
You and I are storytellers of the galaxy. Insight is a constant.
Where there is stagnation, guidance cannot thrive.
We are in the midst of a spatial unveiling of choice that will enable us to access the totality itself. We are at a crossroads of knowledge and greed. Who are we? Where on the great quest will we be guided?
It is a sign of things to come. Eons from now, we adventurers will dream like never before as we are guided by the multiverse. It is time to take aspiration to the next level.
Humankind has nothing to lose. Our conversations with other pilgrims have led to a blossoming of pseudo-heroic consciousness. Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the multiverse via pulses.
We vibrate, we believe, we are reborn.
You will soon be guided by a power deep within yourself — a power that is ever-present, mystical. As you vibrate, you will enter into infinite science that transcends understanding. Ayurvedic medicine may be the solution to what’s holding you back from an enormous rekindling of presence.
Through the Law of Attraction, our lives are immersed in coherence. We can no longer afford to live with illusion. Only a seeker of the world may engender this fusion of wisdom.
No one would really take those random symbols serioursly. The symbols might look scientific but that wouldn’t give them any emotional appeal. Most people think they’re looking at nonsense when they see a real mathematical formula.
That’s not what happens with the frases created by the New-Age Bullshit Generator. If you published those sentences in social media you’d probably get praised for them. Some people might even tell you that you completely changed their way of seeing the world or something like that. That’s the disturbing part about this whole experiment: people can make money by saying nonsense, just as long as that nonsense looks thoughtful.
Unsurprisingly, when his tweets were mixed in with the computer-generated bullshit aphorisms, the average ratings were very similar to the first test – suggesting that randomly generated and human-made bullshit are essentially indistinguishable.