That is definitely Dr. Strangelove. There are a few other fanboys around, but none so thoroughly defensive as he.
Yeah, on second it seems like the fanboyism about Musk himself, but about Tesla and SpaceX, which Chronos seems very much a fan of, while Stranger is decidedly skeptical to the point of hostility. I think this has played out in a few of the Starship-related threads.
I do credit Chronos for being a Musk critic where I hadn’t noticed, though I’m not really sure how one can be optimistic about the prospects of his companies while they’re clearly all wrapped up in the myth of a man who is melting into goo before our very eyes, but that’s a different topic for a different thread.
It’s a definite fact that both SpaceX and Tesla are very successful companies, at least monetarily. It’s also a definite fact that, in terms of the metrics actually relevant for a rocket company, SpaceX is successful (I don’t know enough about Tesla or about the car industry to say if they’re fundamentally successful). It’s also a definite fact that Musk was able to get in on the ground floor of both of those successful companies, as well as PayPal, another successful company (though I don’t think that Musk is very involved with them any more).
And, it’s also a fact that as soon as Musk got involved with Twitter, he turned it to shit extremely thoroughly and extremely rapidly, and that he’s closely tied himself to one of the worst businessmen in history.
I don’t know how to explain all of those facts. Like I said in the other thread, my best guess is that he used to be competent (in business, at least, if not in engineering), but that he’s now somehow broken. And if, in his current broken state, he decided to take a more hands-on control of SpaceX, he’d probably do to them the same thing as he did to Twitter. So I can’t be too optimistic about the future of SpaceX, no matter how well they’re doing now.
That’s the only thing that matters.
I’ll chime in and say that I’ve had my fair share of issues with Stranger over the years and if I were Chronos, I would be tempted to get equally snippy at his stream of bullshit that I constantly see him posting.
His problem is that he’s addicted to the feeling of being an expert and will blithely insert whatever made up nonsense claims make sense in the moment under the fairly confident belief that it’s likely there isn’t someone with specialized enough knowledge to counter specific claims. This would be fine when, if called upon, he treats it as a learning opportunity and acknowledges his layman status and retracts his claims except I almost never see him do this, instead, he tries to bluff and blunder his way through in the hopes that people will not realize how shaky his initial foundations in the subject are.
Two instances I was able to dredge up from my interactions with him:
1, In a thread about China/Taiwan cross-strait conflict:
He casually drops this amongst a dense thicket where he loves to pretend he’s an expert on the issue
I agree that Taiwan let military readiness fall into a poor state in the late-‘Nineties and beginning of the 2000s because the rhetoric about PRC ‘reunification’ became just kind of a background noise but what I’ve seen of readiness estimates in the last ten years shows substantial improvement.
Luckily, I’d been engaged in several debates on reddit on this exact topic and had generated my own home-grown copy-pasta of links which I was able to drop with minimal editing here. I want to emphasize again for the people who might not be super familiar with the topic just how much of a “tell” this is that you’re dealing with a pseudo-expert. It’s as outrageous as someone casually writing “I remember reading in a report somewhere that America has some of the best public transit in the world”. Like, no, you definitely didn’t read anything in any report, you’re just casually making things up and so unfamiliar with the topic you don’t even realize how egregiously you got something wrong. He never returned to address that allegation in that thread but I still see him confidently posting reams in other cross-strait topics on the dope and I just roll my eyes with how many things he gets subtly or obviously wrong. I want to emphasize though that, were it not for the lucky co-incidence of me already having a rebuttal ready to paste in, I don’t think I would have spent the effort to bother countering his ridiculous statement.
2, In a thread about Vaccine timing of the second dose
He drops this absolutely garbled, plausible sounding but completely wrong causal mechanism of how vaccines interact with the immune system:
We know from other vaccines that require boosters that delaying the booster shot significantly results in dramatically lowered long term immunogenicity; essentially, if the ‘virus’ (in the case of a vaccine, the antigen surrogate epitope) doesn’t hang around very long, the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein.
In this case, when correctly called out on it by FigNorton, his response was:
My cite is any immunology textbook written in the last couple of decades. These are not novel insights; it is basic knowledge in the field.
Which, again, is definitely false because that’s not how vaccines work and no textbook would tell you that’s how vaccines work. He just made up something that sounds plausible on the surface and is trying to bluster his way around admitting he’s just making shit up.
I come in and do what should be done in a real debate and provide real cites to real data which shows that vaccines simply do not work the way he claims they do and lengthening doses are associated with more efficacy, not less in at least two extremely well studied vaccines.
He then attempts to quadruple down on the double down with this statement:
However, it is not true that all vaccines have equal or better efficacy with a longer interval between the initial vaccination and a booster. The trivalent oral polio vaccine in particular has a quantifiable reduction in effectiveness if the booster schedule is significantly delayed. This is for an interval exceeding four years, but the point remains
Which I point out is clearly an attempt at him finding whatever scrap of a cite he can to try and preserve a fig leaf of legitimacy but it’s plainly obvious he was grasping for cites in the moment because the only cite he found was one from 1978 and only showed a booster efficacy drop after 4 years, as he even pointed out himself. If this was a claim found in “every immunology textbook” and is “basic knowledge of the field”, then surely he has plenty of cites that are way higher quality than the one he provides but he can’t because he’s not the expert he’s claiming to be and he’s just making random shit up.
I cannot emphasize just how it exhausting it is dealing with confabulists where you just want to pin them down on a basic lie they told and they just keep on twisting and spinning and throwing more bullshit at you because they have no shame.
I’m not paid to post here and I can’t be paid enough to deal with anyone with a known history of doubling down on their lies. I still have scars from the Blake days where I recall him confidently asserting that washing a chicken under tap water would increase the bacterial load on the chicken and that cats definitely couldn’t jump on top of a 1m fence purely from the ground and anyone who had observed it happening were under an optical illusion where they were invisibly grasping the fence halfway up. So I’m 100% on Chronos’ side here where, in an ideal world, we should be professional courteous to everyone we deal with for ourselves more than for others, but when faced with someone so fucking annoying, it’s perfectly natural to let the mask slip.
Well yeah. That’s the sort of case I was referencing. This stuff is my lane and the claim is just plain wrong, it is not what our immunology texts taught us, and it is in particularly wrong relevant COVID: delayed boosters actually resulted in a bigger booster response. Optimal timing and impact of delay varies on a case by case basis but in general too early is a problem and later is mainly a problem only due to the window with needlessly suboptimal waning protection, not because the vaccine booster response is less.
Again being mistaken happens to us all. But the degree of expressed extreme confidence when so very very mistaken? When they in fact are spreading misinformation? The absent self awareness that they are putting on expert airs about something they are not in any way expert about? Yeah it is problematic.
I am hoping that they can read this without feeling attacked. I completely concur with the belief that there are areas in which they are expert and that a fair fraction of what they post is probably true. I just can’t trust it when they are so confidently wrong about things I do know. And fact checking their posts (“trust but verify” was the suggestion) is way too much work.
Here is a great example (I promise it’s a short read). Stranger straight up makes up facts about the smallish town where I have lived since 1990 and then doubles down before being shot down by three natives.
Since you linked to a post where is he was replying to me, I will have to say I was disappointed in his comments in that thread.
I lived in Taiwan for 10 years and my wife of 19 years is Taiwanese.
He really misses the mark there.
But to be fair, damn near everyone gets Taiwan and Japan wrong here.
Yeah, dude has clearly never been to Santa Barbara. Or if he has, he wasn’t paying much attention.
And then there was the argument I had with him about the effects of water vapor emissions from hydrogen fuel. It’s not the incorrect statement itself that’s annoying – we all make mistakes. It was, first of all, the inexplicable hostility of Stranger’s response.
But much worse than that was Stranger coming into this thread and falsely accusing me of dishonesty and disingenuous argument by deceptively quoting him in order to “win” the argument, which is absolutely not the case and anyone can see it’s not the case. And he never came back to explain just what it was in my quotes that was deceptive, or why he didn’t report these supposedly deceptive quotes to a moderator. I do not appreciate being falsely labelled as dishonest.
It’s a sham. The more one understands whatever topic Stranger_On_A_Train is talking about, the more one realizes they are bullshitting. There’s some correct info, but the bullshit is there scattered throughout. I’ve put them on ignore because it’s not worth my time trying to strain the nuggets of knowledge from the bullshit of ignorance.
And it’s not worth my time trying to correct Stranger_On_A_Train. Based on responses in this thread, they are apparently as thin-skinned as ever. I come to this site to learn and teach, but not to win arguments. And ignorance and argument is all that poster has to offer.
Wow, it’s like that Chinese proverb: “he who would BBQ Pit another should best bring two skewers.”
I think the particular danger here is that a lot of us don’t know much about everything and speaking for myself, I have kinda just assumed he was right about anything to do with science or math. Because my last experience with those subjects was high school. It’s very hard when you don’t have that grounding to separate fact from fiction.
There was a recent thread where someone had an employee who claimed a TBI had resulted in him being unable to control his swearing. People were skeptical of this. Stranger called it patent bullshit that a brain injury could affect someone in this way.
Now I’m not a neuropsychologist but it’s a huge personal interest of mine, and I just didn’t think this was obvious bullshit. The prefrontal cortex plays a huge role in impulse control and I could see how damage to that part of the brain might result in a form of Tourette’s that results in copious swearing.
I’m not an expert on Tourette’s, but I know one. My husband is one of the few psychologists in our area with this specialization and training. So I asked him. Is this bullshit? Because I’m feeling like it’s plausible.
And he said no, it’s totally plausible. Not saying that’s definitely the case specific to the man in question, just that it’s really not a bullshit claim on its face that a brain injury could result in excessive swearing. Most of the resources I found online referred to the more classic idea of Tourette’s which for a minority of people can cause loud, inappropriate interjections that include swearing - so this is not an easy thing to find a cite for. It’s probably going to apply for a minority of people already in the minority.
But if my husband knows anything about anything, it’s tic disorders. And he’s more anal about accuracy, especially within his field, than anyone I know. It’s annoying as fuck, because I can’t tell him anything I read or hear about that doesn’t demand a raft of citations. (Sound familiar?)
But this is just an example to me of how an assertion can seem true unless you know just enough about it to start picking that assumption apart.
This is less about Stranger in particular than just the lessons I’m learning around this. I recently read an article in the Persuasion Substack (I’m still too new of a reader to endorse it) about “highbrow misinformation,” which are the sort of things highly educated people believe are true because it aligns with their viewpoint and because experts are saying it’s true and we trust experts and experts lean progressive so we all just end up with this collection of progressive assumptions that may flounder under scrutiny.
And I’ll cop to there being a fair amount of things I assume are true because I have no reason to believe experts are wrong, not because I actually looked at the research myself. And that’s interesting because I feel like I’m in a constant battle to fight misinformation in the field of psychology which is proliferated by professionals who claim to be experts but who are in fact pulling shit out of their asses.
So I should probably know better, right?
Food for thought.
And this is why overconfident bullshitters can be a disservice to the board. We don’t have many, but we’ve had a few. With the examples given, which were from threads that I wasn’t following, I’m coming around to the view that Stranger as been wrong more often than I’d realized. But it’s still his reaction to being corrected, and worse, the hostile and untrue counter-accusations, that are so irritating.
I’ve never seen that behaviour in Chronos, whatever his other quirks might be.
I mean, this forum is about fighting ignorance— it says so in the description— but, as for taking anyone’s word for anything if you are not sure about it, the words of the “M.I.T. License” come to mind: `M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided “as-is” without express or applied warranty.’ You may explicitly take that to be the case for anything I write. Also, if anything factual is under discussion, you have the right to, and probably should, ask for references and citations (which you will then need to evaluate for trustworthiness and reliability, etc.) You had better not accept argument from authority of anonymous Internet people, nor in real-life published papers and reports, for that matter.
I agree a modicum of humility is good for any kind of debate.
Also, to correct my statement above, I did take an astronomy course in college, which counted as half a math class, and I didn’t do great. I also took stats 350, which I absolutely rocked, and that was no mean feat - it was a weeder course for clinical psychology. But that was over 20 years ago, and I have massive gaps in my knowledge in science and math. For example, I’ve never had calc or physics at any level. So I’m mostly just going around taking people at their word.
And that’s the kind of stuff you can’t easily verify with a google search. Like, in order for me to even understand an argument about physics, I would have to first learn physics – which I am actually trying to do. I found an app. But I’m never going to understand this stuff as well as an engineer or someone who does this stuff for a living. I’m a writer.
This thread is very educational, in a very “Was slavery really a “Major” cause of the Texas revolution?” way.
There’s anonymous and there’s anonymous. This is a small enough community. Some individuals have track records.
For some I trust them as expert sources. Their post can be the cite as far as I am concerned, although they often have referenced their claims anyway. This is especially true when they post about specific subjects, but often outside them as well as they have also established good track records of qualifying what they are not sure about and why they believe something is the case. I’m not going to double check @Hari_Seldon on anything he says about math @Tamerlane? If they say it it is true unless proven otherwise. And various posters on matters of how our educational system works and more. I am very comfortable accepting their argument as authoritative (even though they do not argue from authority).
For others? Well some have less of a consistently reliable track record.
Yeah, I saw that thread. My internal response was “I’ve known someone with Tourette’s very well. Their brain arrived at that configuration through their normal growth. Getting into a similar configuration through injury seems entirely plausible.” I’m glad your husband agrees.
Heheh, all I can really say is that he doesn’t like Marcel Duchamp very much, and he knows a lot more about what he likes than he does about criticism of art and its impact on the wider art world. Nothing too horrible about that. After all, art theory and criticism are pale shadows of being moved by or loving a work of art. Heck, they don’t even really teach you how to be a better artist very much. They mostly just let you know what you’re building upon, if that.
Both posters are a bit prickly (that’s a sin I’m guilty of myself). Neither are terrible, both are pretty fun. Don’t be afraid to ask for cites from anybody, though.
That you know someone with Tourette’s is irrelevant unless they had the symptoms described in the OP. Do they? I suspect not because you would have mentioned it were it the case. As far as what caused their condition, you don’t know. So you know someone with Tourette’s who doesn’t have the symptoms the other guy did and you don’t know what caused it. From that starting point you’re willing to make any conclusion? Why?
Stranger said:
In response to this:
How did you get Tourette’s from that description. Is it anything more than Tourette’s is the one condition you associate with cursing? Why does it have to be Tourette’s? You’re claiming that you know better than the person with the cursing disorder. That guy didn’t say a TBI gave him Tourette’s, he said it left him unable to control his swearing.
The OP wasn’t asking if there was any way this could be described as Tourette’s. Yet, that’s the challenge you undertook completely unprompted. Why?
Anyway here’s your husband’s response:
If Tourette’s can consist of “inserting swear words into sentences that don’t need it,” well, golly, I guess this motherfucker has Tourette’s, too.