What's Nonsense, and Why It Persists

Sources: yQMvSFmrvTU, DaNr2wygvpQ, t_Kv0MoIrXE, aXS0gG7ppn0, 1tZKL7T94hQ, gjw8y7SsYIY

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1. The verdicts

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2. Five mechanisms that make nonsense feel true

The Barnum effect

Named after P.T. Barnum — "our tendency to rate vague, general personality descriptors as highly accurate when we believe they've been tailored specifically to us."

> Your profile says you're "someone who values deep thinking but also enjoys meaningful connections." You think "that's exactly me" — when in fact it's exactly everyone.

> "When have you ever had an MBTI or DiSC test tell you that you're actually a horrible person? You haven't." Descriptions are engineered to be universally flattering and just specific enough to feel personal. Same mechanism as horoscopes.

Borrowed credibility

The recurring move: attach a real name or real vocabulary to an unvalidated idea.

• MBTI, DiSC and Insights all invoke Jung
• NLP invokes its founders' academic affiliations — "as if the word psychology sprinkled near a name magically validates the entire circus"
• NLP "stole framing from behavioural psychology to give itself legitimacy" (Zn_nEXBqO4s)

> "You can spend three years studying psychology and still produce ideas with no scientific merit. Credentials don't sanctify nonsense. Evidence does." > "When your material doesn't withstand scrutiny, you start waving around academic affiliations from 50 years ago."

The scientific veneer

DiSC "borrows the language and formats you'd expect from something scientific" — a questionnaire, a profile, a quadrant, a wheel, percentages. > "It looks official, it sounds technical, and the language is tremendously confident" — "your DiSC style is..." as though something has been measured.

Repetition into authority

The seven-pricing convention "came from one person split testing in direct mail," shared at seminars, "repeated so many times that it acquired the weight of established science." > "Like a family recipe that nobody has ever checked against the original."

Commercial incentive

> "You sell training licences to consultants, who sell workshops to companies — and everyone profits except the science."

DiSC has been "repackaged and resold so many times that what you're buying today is several generations removed from anything Marston wrote" — "the connection to the original is mostly just branding."

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3. Evaluative conditioning — nonsense that turns against you

The sharpest practical finding, from gjw8y7SsYIY:

97/197/497/997 has been paired so often with "six-figure blueprint" courses — "delivered by somebody standing in front of a rented Lamborghini" — that the number itself now triggers distrust.

> The critical property: evaluative conditioning is resistant to extinction. Explain that seven is arbitrary and the feeling of distrust persists. > "Anyone still using 97-pricing is fighting a learned aversion in a growing portion of their audience — and they can't reason their way out of it, because the aversion was never rational to begin with."

The same logic applies to "limited edition" (6b0R53Z04HU) — worn out by overuse until it triggers reactance in experienced buyers.

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4. The colour case — a myth with a real lesson underneath

What's false: red makes you aggressive, blue makes you creative, pink jail cells calm prisoners.

What's true: colour carries learned, cultural meanings. Red is danger in the UK, weddings and prosperity in China. "Same pigment, opposite meanings."

> "If orange was luxurious, flying to Alicante would be a luxury holiday."

And the famous ones were accidents: Hermès orange came from WWII packaging shortages; Louboutin's red was borrowed nail polish; Tiffany blue was chosen because turquoise was fashionable in the 1840s.

> The real lesson: meaning is built by consistent repetition, not chosen from a chart. — the same mechanism as manufactured recognition in 9eDkvWe-YaA. So stop agonising, pick one, and hold it rigidly.

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5. ⚠️ The uncomfortable turn — luxury uses these mechanisms too

The channel does not exempt itself. From DaNr2wygvpQ:

> "This is where it gets interesting for anyone working in luxury, because we use Barnum statements constantly. We just don't call it that."

• "You've been selected for a private viewing because of your distinctive taste."
• "I thought of you immediately when this piece came in — it's very you."

> "That's a vague positive statement dressed up as a personal insight. And the client accepts it because it confirms something they already believe about themselves. It works spectacularly well."

The stated ethical line

> "Unlike MBTI, nobody in luxury is pretending that it's science. And that's the difference."

Two objections are distinguished throughout:

1. The technique works — Barnum statements, anchoring and defaults are all endorsed elsewhere
2. The fraud is the scientific claim — and especially using unvalidated instruments for hiring and promotion decisions, which is the recurring real-world objection

(A related but unresolved ethical debate about influence vs. manipulation runs through dZDFXTrneJI.)

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6. The channel's own evidential standard

Worth noting, because it's applied inconsistently and you should read accordingly:

Where it's careful:

• Names sources — Thomas & Morwitz, Friestad & Wright, Elliot & Maier, Johnson & Goldstein, Reber & Schwarz, Michael Spence
• Volunteers replication problems: on the jam study — "that study has replication problems and effect sizes vary by context, so I wouldn't treat it as gospel" (RT_nEw64gXA)
• Distinguishes what research supports (charm pricing in 9s) from practitioner folklore (7s)
• Took the NLP master practitioner course himself to check

Where it isn't:

• Many prescriptions (never discount, never itemise, always publish prices) are professional opinion presented with the same confidence as cited findings
• Anecdote does a lot of work — memorable, but n=1
• Trend claims conflict across videos (TvrYaXt3L0g vs k3J9a8DS_As) without reconciliation