VoxAdActa

Not commenting on whether or not the story is true, but I do agree that it probably wasn’t made by AI.

I read scientific papers in academic journals every day, so I’m very familiar with the style and conventions of academic writing. This post reads like it was written by someone who’s trying very hard not to write a scientific paper, but whose primary writing practice is entirely in writing scientific papers. The prose in this piece will often begin in a storytelling style, then slowly drift back to academic writing, persist in that mode for a while, then the author seems to realize it and yank the reins to go back to storytelling.

While I admit that LLMs are good at mimicking different writing styles, I’m not at all confident they’re capable of pulling off the kind of slow-drifting back-and-forth that I see in this post, especially while remaining inside the specific formatting skeleton of an academic paper.

It’s news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That’s what all the “US news is world news!” people were saying in the meta thread.

I want to see someone replicate the results of a prayer.

What religion changes its dogma when new information arises? I can’t think of one.

Hey now, that’s unfair! It only took Mormons a little under 150 years to decide that black people were allowed in Heaven!

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

The keyword doesn’t make the statements credible. This is exactly what I’m talking about. The description of the fallacy is just as credible as the name of the fallacy. You’re doing the same thing I’m criticizing in other people; thinking that the latin words are the important part, rather than the concept of what makes a fallacy.

The definition of a word isn’t in doubt if the word itself isn’t listed on the same line.

It’s also difficult to point it out when someone is doing it. Pointing out that they are participating in a fallacy never turns out how we want hahaha

This graphic would be more effective if it didn’t include the fallacy names at the end of the commandments. It’s not the concepts that get laughed at, it’s the keywords they’ve been trained to jump on and make fun of. They don’t understand the concepts behind the keywords at all.

Dumbass culture has done excellent marketing/propaganda work in making the word “fallacy” a joke. Fortunately, there’s an easy workaround: you just don’t use the word or any of its terminology. They can’t tell you’re accusing them of a logical fallacy if you don’t actually use the handful of words they’ve learned to meet with thought-terminating cliches.

Examples (from “more polite” to “less polite”):

Incorrect - “That’s a false dichotomy!”

Correct - “What makes you think those are the only two possibilities?”

Incorrect - “I won’t fall for your straw man argument.”

Correct - “Nobody but you actually believes that. That’s not even what we’re talking about.”

Incorrect - “That’s not an argument, it’s just an appeal to popularity.”

Correct - “Most of us grew out of the ‘but moooom, everyone else is doing it!’ at about 14.” or “So if everyone in this thread thinks it’s cool to just punch you in the nutsack, we should go ahead and do it because that makes it right? I’ll go first.”

They won’t recognize your rebuttal if it doesn’t include one or more of those keywords right up front. Like an AI chat bot, they don’t understand the meaning of words they’re criticizing (or, often, even the words they’re saying). They just know that [X]% of the time, saying [Y] when someone else says [Q] ends the argument and gets them upvotes.

It’s a lot like how a song can’t be included in the Christian Music genre if it doesn’t drop the word “Jesus” every second line, no matter how Christian the lyrics are otherwise.

About the only thing we can do is unsubscribe from and block the dozen or so “Reddit Sucks” communities/magazines, and report the “We Still Hate Reddit” threads that pop up elsewhere for being posted in the wrong place (like Technology or Gaming or wherever).