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... and my job was to watch a hole
One day I was asked to go get a channel lock wrench from the tool trailer. I did not know what a channel-lock wrench was. I still remember the expression on the journeyman's face when I asked him if he could tell me what it looked like. Keep in mind, while he was in the vessel, he was relying on me to watch out for his safety. He concluded that his safety was not in good hands. Obviously, any non-retard knows what a channel lock wrench is.
In case anybody else now wanted to know what a channel-lock wrench is:
Heuristics are great at hints about whether a person is knowledgeable or not, but perhaps should be given slightly less weight in our evaluations than a person's arguments or actions. Mr Bunney may be capable of producing useful podcast insights even while being ignorant -- but how will we know?
Good point, we might be smart in some specific way, but how smart are we really in determining someone else's smartness? Being smart is a very specific thing. Dumb is a more a general thing.
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yes, i too searched for wrenches (in my capacity as a hole watcher) and came up with many wrong wrenches. Wrench enthusiasts will probably correct us both here.
Channel locks are cool because they are faster to adjust than a crescent wrench. Also you can kind of open them up a bit and slide around the nut whereas with a crescent you have to pull the wrench off the nut and getting it back on can be difficult--however, you don't have to squeeze a crescent wrench...so you can probably exert more torque.
Here in Portugal, we call that tool a 'english wrench' (monkey wrench?). Don’t ask me why!
my job was to watch a hole.
that sounds, um... inappropriate!
Mr Bunney may be capable of producing useful podcast insights even while being ignorant -- but how will we know?
oh, definitely. I've enjoyed some of his podcast appearances (WBD way back was stunning), and I sort of believe most of his overarching take... (monetary arrangements impact mentality), it's just that his evidence supporting it is crap, and his description of i.e., the monetary system is outlandishly stupid.
Lovely story, too (and I know what a channel lock wrench is, just not that it was called that!)
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We are all retarded, just some people are better at avoiding circumstances where it shows.
This is also a valid point, sometimes people just don't know or don't want to deal with an issue and base themselves on what common sense says about it.
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ai slop. After all, it is a similar kind of heuristic people use to evaluate whether a post is slop of not (the presence of the em dash, too many emojis, the this, not that pattern, etc). There may be good and interesting things in the slop, but unfortunately, it's an asymmetric battle: slop can be generated at significantly less cost than is required to evaluate it. But heuristics seem like such a blunt tool for the job.