aw, well, i’m not precious about the term. All I meant was that if you look at someone’s post history and they’re a chud, that should inform how you read whatever they write.

My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!

I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists.

Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. “democrats are making the frogs gay with fluoride”, “lizard people illuminati”, or even “there’s a war on Christmas” type shit. And when they say “do your own research”, they don’t mean “seek out a variety of sources and verifiable data”, they mean “read the stuff that agrees with what I’m saying”.

When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no “intelligence” in an LLM, but does the public? etc. I’ll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they don’t know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.

And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I don’t think anyone here needs this reminder, but I’ll note that an open mind means that you don’t just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. I’m not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.

And to bring it back to the original question. If you read something and it’s not exactly within your purview, and you’re not sure if it’s being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.

E: redaction of fluff

I see. I guess I was thinking too abstractly about how a system like this might work.

Doesn’t look interesting to me. NB I’m not a Swifty. If you’re someone looking to make a compile-time dependency injection validation framework, cycle detection seems like an early feature to add, and feels like a pretty early unit test to implement.

E: read response from BurgersMcSlopshot please :)

*pig turned into a frog

Still the one baby

part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.

What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.

Just confirming that none of what is described really approaches engineering.

Fat Blunt Gong

Freemason Freebasin’

Orthodoxycodone

these fucking people: “art is when picture matches words in little card next to picture”

yes! To be clear, what I said was lacking nuance. What I meant was: preaching for only non-violence is fucked. And preaching for very limited forms of non-violence is fully fucked, for example, state/police sanctioned “peaceful” protests as the only form of protest

now adopting ‘electrons’ when they mean power

Definitely have seen salty say this. What’s next? “Quantum AI development is bottlenecked by waveforms”??? I hate this shit

probably more of a shin megami tensei deal where you have to fuse one with a mushroom or something and you get the other

Thinking that debates are the ultimate decider of who is right or wrong is like, twelve year old shit. Hence the internet debate industrial complex

I’ve subscribed, it scratches the itch between waiting for episodes of if books could kill!

Closest abilities I have off the top of my head are maybe “Own Tempo” or “Hustle”. Or the held item “Blunder Policy”

E: also: Unaware, Cloud Nine, Oblivious

Yes! It also highlights how willing the administration is to clamp down on even non-violence.

realising that preaching nonviolence is actually fascist propaganda is one of those consequences of getting radicalised/deprogramming from being a liberal. You can’t liberate the camps with a sit-in, for example.