@philosophyminis: Pseudo-profound BS is when somebody strings together a series of deep-sounding words, and listeners interpret it as being deep. For example, somebody says that ‘the force of now will make you whole,’ and everybody nods along. That is brilliant. Put it on a poster, double tap to like, and reshare. But in 2015, the researcher Gordon Pennycook won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing that a lot of people can't tell the difference between genuine philosophy and pseudo-profound BS. And of course, as somebody like me, that is a bit of a worry. Pennycook argued that there are two reasons for this. The first is structural. If you read a well-formed or even beautiful sentence, you want to assume that the author has given as much thought to the meaning as to the poetry, and the second is to do with the words themselves. If you come across deep and philosophical words, you want the sentence to work. And if you can't at first understand it, you blame yourself rather than the incomprehensible word salad in front of you. The confusion gets relabelled as depth, and the author gets rebranded as some misunderstood sage. But as Nietzsche once put it, we should beware those who muddy the water to make it appear deep. There is an entire class of people in marketing, management, politics, the wellness industry, and in philosophy, who think that stringing together a series of profound words makes them a genius. But words are only as deep as they can be understood. And if somebody hides their ideas behind long, pretentious, purple prose, then perhaps their ideas weren't as clear as they thought at the start.

Jonny Thomson

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Region: GB

Friday 22 May 2026 14:25:50 GMT