Thread by @alexandrosM

I've started trying something that may look irritating, but is testing a hypothesis. Namely:

If a tweet, with minimal modifications, can become a perfectly coherent reply to itself, then the original is vacuous meta-commentary that can be discarded without further consideration.

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1438649907301126148

I've been noticing quite a few of these on-high "pretending to be wise" kind of quips that sound wise until one realizes that they are entirely free-floating and cannot be distinguished from their negatives, which also sound just as wise.

It's perfectly possible that I myself have written stuff like this in the past, though I usually try to write with reference to facts, such that a simple reversal wouldn't work. I'll continue to investigate and refine the hypothesis.

If something like it can be clearly shown to be correct, we'll have a straightforward tool to eliminate vacuous truisms and deepities from our conversations, failure modes that the Very Smart People tend to fall for constantly.

I want to make very clear that it is still possible that my argument proves too much. If so, it will be possible for it to be used successfully against meaningful content, which is not the intent. If there's a practical sensemaking project I'm on these last few months, it's to...

...build weapons of mass sensemaking that only work to neutralize bad ideas, but don't work on good ideas. This one here is a promising candidate, but it's still under development. Tell me what you think, or try it and see what happens.

Ooh! I think I have identified a pre-existing real-world example of this technique. The "evil god challenge" takes the problem of evil and turns it into an intuitive contradiction. Whether it works or not is another story, but the approach is the same, and for the same reason.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_God_…