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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the "everything is political" and "do your own research" lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.
Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don't have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it's a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he's writing for other fascists, but you won't necessarily see that unless you're looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.
My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!
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
insert previous rant about how fucking awful the term Gell-Mann amnesia is and how we should all stop using it, illustrated with that Batman "this is the weapon of the enemy" meme
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.
Yeah, sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. People, including many who should know better, have adopted a term specifically designed to shut down media literacy and foment a "do your own research" culture, and it maddens me.
All good friendo