Is it alluring? Does it fit within some nice narrative? Can it be explained inside a one-page newspaper article? Then it has enough going for it that it doesn't necessairly need to be true in order to propagate.
This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true.
Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
"whose goals get accomplished by believing this claim" is the biggest question to get into a habit of asking yourself. make it unconscious. make it follow every line of written text and every sentence you hear.
you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit.
advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need.
then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb.
if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit?
remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success.
this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.
Enumerating badness and blacklisting it is a bad approach in security. I believe that this applies to detecting bullshit. It comes in many forms, including those that make you believe you are cutting through bullshit.
Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
For the same reason you will not be printing a mechanical watch: the device parts have a resolution that is measured in 1/100ths of a mm, no 3D printer that is even close to affordable can make parts like that. Besides that you will want your parts to be made out of metal powder to be sintered rather than plastic filament which is the material of choice for budget 3D printers.
It's been done, but you run into problems immediately. For one the tolerances on 3D printing are not as tight as you'd like for a device like a Curta, which is why the example I'm aware of printed a replica at a much larger scale. Additionally, 3D printed plastics are typically not very strong, and they change shape over time. This means that the usable lifetime of a 3D printed Curta is typically not very high.
Solving blindfolded is just momorizing 2 sequences about phone number length. Not a whole lot of visualization. Might be different for the top tier bld solvers
I don't think it's an American English thing. It does clarify that a suspension is temporary. Using ban instead would make the difference between a ban and suspension more ambiguous imo.
But by that definition, every not-yet-extinct species is intelligent. Or at least, every species that responds in any way to external environment in order to enhance survival and reproduction... which is pretty much every species.
You're assuming a binary extant/extinct dichotomy. That may work on the level of an individual species, but not on the colony level. The colony is simply attempting to propagate itself. So the utility at a given time could be given by something that measures the current size of the colony, the size of its descendants, and some estimate of how much each colony will further propagate.
Definitely. I've recently started exercising more. My bare minimum commitment to myself is to walk a half an hour a day. I regularly do more, but if I only do 30 minutes I don't feel guilty. No matter how long of a day I've had, I'm never too tired to walk for 30 minutes. It's also a good way to build self control through habit.
