Wednesday, April 23, 2014

New Age bullshit generator

Well, this will certainly make Deepak Chopra's life a lot easier, huh?

New Age Bullshit Generator

Namaste. Do you want to sell a New Age product and/or service? Tired of coming up with meaningless copy for your starry-eyed customers? Want to join the ranks of bestselling self-help authors? We can help.

Just click and the truth will manifest


Click the Reionize electrons button at the top of the page to generate a full page of New Age poppycock.

It works, too, although I value my readers far too much to inflict the result on you. If you're curious, try it out yourself.

In a blog post, Seb Pearce explains further why he created this:
A while back, I was on a philosophy debate binge. Watching Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens annihilate their opponents with precision and wit is my idea of a good night in [mine, too], and YouTube’s “related videos” are a deep, dark rabbithole.

I stumbled upon two debates involving Deepak Chopra: one alongside possible alien Jean Houston against Sam Harris and Michael Shermer called Does God Have A Future? and one against Richard Dawkins at the Dangerous Ideas festival. I had never seen Chopra speak before, and I was only familiar with his name from cheesy-looking self-help titles. As I watched the debate, his childish behaviour and smugness amazed me. He constantly interrupted and talked over the others, usually to make cheap shots or have the last word instead of making a sound argument. He got weirdly defensive when Harris pointed out that nobody at the debate was qualified to talk about quantum physics — quantum is one of his favourite buzzwords — and boasted that he was the most qualified one there because he’s an MD(!). It’s clear the man isn’t used to being challenged.

The thing that really impressed me, though, was his command of the vocabulary of woo (short for woo-woo for those not in the skeptic scene). This word is a blanket term for pseudoscience, New Age thinking, dubious alternative medicine and other things that reek of the heady fumes of snake oil. ...

As I sat there listening to the debates, I thought to myself, “This all sounds like random sequences of buzzwords. I bet I could write code to generate it.” It seemed like not only a fun side project, but a great way to prove how easy it is to make hogwash that looks compelling. It might help show that it’s the language games and emotions that lure people into this stuff. I started scribbling down any words I could think of that evoked a feeling of bullshit: quantum, growth, matrix, path, potential, flowering

And thus the New Age Bullshit Generator was born.

He really did do a great job with this. Try it out. This random bullshit generator sounds just like much of the 'real' woo I've heard.

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