# DrDeth is Pitted Again

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/drdeth-is-pitted-again/1024044>\
**Category:** The BBQ Pit\
**Created:** [October 17, 2025, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/drdeth-is-pitted-again/1024044 "2025-10-17T03:32:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 46

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**Author:** ![DETXL](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/detxl/32/19366_2.png) [@DETXL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DETXL)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2025, 8:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/drdeth-is-pitted-again/1024044/46 "2025-11-03T08:05:18Z")

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That one perplexes me. I feel like most of us, if we were going to pretend to have read a book, would at least know to skim the introduction where the author dismisses the entire concept of finding "the bad guy” as fatally flawed, or would at least _spell the title correctly_.

He’s like a longitudinal experiment in how the cardinal sin isn’t “being really blatant about Googling things to make yourself seem smarter.” We’ve all done that. It’s “being _really, really_ _bad_ about Googling things to make yourself seem smarter” with a side of doubling down on the weird thing you just said, presumably hoping that appearing to be a true believer will make it less obvious that you spent 30 seconds copying the first result of a web search and 0 seconds actually reading it.

There is apparently some compulsion to post in every thread whether or not you know anything about the topic, I guess. I don’t really get why, on a message board of actual people with subject-matter expertise, posters feel the need to jump in immediately by asking ChatGPT for the answer, but at least ChatGPT is very unlikely to tell you that its opinion of Cicero came from its father, who campaigned with Julius Caesar in Gaul.

(We will never find out, because I’m 100% sure ChatGPT blocked DrDeth after he couldn’t restrain himself from responding to each sentence separately with “yep” or “good one” or [calling some author he doesn’t like a terrorist](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-that-should-have-been-read-in-high-school/1022741/23))

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