Will AI Kill This Group?

As if Phil Allison wasn't into trolling himself. Unlike Cursitor Doom he did have skills in electronics, and really knew his way around audio electronics. I did make that point here from time to time, but it didn't save me from getting savaged by Phil when I espoused a point of view he didn't like. He struck me as pretty thin-skinned in a quite a lot of areas, and regrettably prone to over-react.

Whoops!

I'm afraid your assessment of others' cognition isn't worth a jot, Bill. For example, from the notorious thread started by Phil Allison in which he desperately pleads for you to stop stalking him, you remarked:

"Joe Biden isn't in the least demented either. Donald Trump did push out some election propaganda making this claim, but very few Americans seem to have taken it seriously, and all of them were silly enough to believe the rest of Trump's nonsense and even voted for him."

You were informed repeatedly at the time (2021) by Phil, myself and others, that Biden *was* suffering from senile dementia - as has subsequently been accepted by all (even the BBC and CNN). Video clips were posted proving it to be the case. But you continued to deny it! In so doing, you reveal yourself to be a stranger to the truth and a wooly-headed old fool whose opinions should be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

On 7/09/2025 8:14 pm, Cursitor Doom wrote: > On Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:27:52 -0700, john larkin snipped-for-privacy@glen--canyon.com > wrote: >

Back when I was still able to get work, I did quite a lot of work cleaning up after less expert design engineers. Being able to find errors and correct them certainly looked like a useful skill back then.

Claiming that there could be " less expert design engineers" looks equally silly.

So you don't claim any particular skill in the area of jokes. But you can tell other people that they have a feeble grasp of what makes a joke. I'll leave it there.

There's a difference between being able to find errors and correct them, and telling other people how stupid they are for making the errors. You seem to think that it is necessary to tell someone else they are stupid for them to see that it might be best not to repeat the error they made. It may not even have been an error. It may be that you had insufficient information to be able to determine whether it was an error or not.

If you're quick to think that everyone else must be less expert than you then you're going to run into difficulty with other people.

I would not have bothered posting a correction Bill because in normal circumstances no-one else would have cared about an error so obvious that it didn't matter. Posting a correction in this case just makes you look even more silly.

As you know, it's only because there was a certain irony in your post that it was pointed out at all.

People are very different. We can't help being smart or dumb about various things scientific or technical or personal or whatever. We should be grateful for whatever skills we have and should be helpful to others when we can.

Everybody is happier and better off like that. The power of The West is mostly from that Judeo/Christian/Enlightenment attitude: be friendly and helpful to everyone, when you can.

Sloman is just nasty.

What all that evidence proved was that Joe Biden made a lot of speech errors, but while that might have been evidence of some measure dementia, it wasn't senile dementia - he'd been making lots of speech errors throughout his political career. Whatever the problem was, it didn't reflect any defect in his general political expertise, which was considerable.

He continued to perform pretty well for the first three years of his presidency, and his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump came as a surprise.

You and Phil Alison didn't know enough about speech errors to appreciate this point. I did - my wife studied them for years, and her friend Vicky Fromkin (whom I knew well) had written an article on the subject for the Scientific American.

A few years later my wife got a similar article - in French - into the French equivalent.

One of her colleagues - Brian Butterworth - did diagnose Ronald Reagan's early dementia when he was running for his second term, but that did depend on picking up a particular pattern of speech errors. I've mentioned his name here in the past.

Larry Altman - another one of her acquaintanances - has posted about it more recently in "Language Log".

Most people can tell when a joke falls flat. That doesn't call for any particular skill. Cursitor Doom's attempt to pass off a bit of hyperbole as a joke is even more obviously pathetic.

And you seem to have fallen for it.

Except that I don't actually do that. John Larkin reacts badly when he doesn't get the praise he expects, but I don't go to the trouble of calling him stupid. And wouldn't - he isn't stupid, just under-informed.

I don't think that Ive ever been quite as blunt as that.

That is what is going on, most of the time. It's a bit silly not to exploit all the information that is available, but it does take time, and when to stop looking should be a judgement call. The people who never seem to look in the first place are taking a foolish risk.

That isn't the situation here. People post stuff that makes it obvious that they know less than they should, and aren't enthusiastic about recognising that they could have done better.

Which is a nasty observation. Quite why John Larkin feels that depriving him of the praise that he craves is actually nasty has its own implications. It isn't friendly or helpful to let people delude themselves, even it makes them happy (in the short term).

So what Bill? The actual point (which you seem to have lost) is that there's no need to tell the individual making the joke that they are stupid (which you did by telling the individual that their grasp of what makes a joke is feeble).

When I hear someone make a joke which I consider to be feeble, I don't tell them that they are stupid. Particularly not if I don't claim any particular skill myself in the area of jokes. Most likely I would do nothing at all. In some circumstances I might attempt to assist the individual with improving their jokes.

Carry on making yourself look stupid if you wish. I don't mind.

Some people might disagree.

So you keep saying in every other post. Repeating it over and over again just makes you look stupid.

Do you own a mirror?

So although you have insufficient information (which implies that you know less than you should), you still imply that others are at fault for "knowing less than they should"?

Who are you to decide what others should know?

Being called stupid (directly or implicitly) isn't likely to persuade anyone that they could have done better. But it you give them some assistance then they might become enthusiastic about doing better.

I am done with this thread and will not likely reply further.

Poor old Bill. He just doesn't know when he's in a hole and it's time to stop digging.

And some of them have posted in this thread. If you can find an example of my actually calling somebody stupid. or something that you think is equivalent to that, do post it.

John Larkin calls me "nasty" at regular intervals, so I'm obviously doing something that he doesn't like. The fact that I don't admire his circuits strikes me as the only way I could be irritating him enough to provoke him into calling me nasty. Like you, he doesn't post specific examples where he thought that I was being nasty to him, and more than you have posted a specific example of me calling somebody (presumably you) stupid.

There are several around the flat I own and live in, so the answer is yes. How would owning a mirror influence how bluntly I express myself?

I don't know as much as I might, but I do know quite a bit, and many years of being a senior engineer and telling more junior engineers things that they needed to know has left its traces.

A retired senior engineer who got paid for doing it for many years.

It can work that way at work. If the junior engineers feel that they are being helped, and get praised when they get something right, or - better

- improve on a suggestion from some other engineer, it can definitely improve morale. Here there's rarely enough personal interaction to make it work. I had enough interaction here with the late Tony Williams to learn stuff from him, and tell him about stuff that he hadn't known about, but that's rare.

Seems reasonable.

More wishful thinking from Cursitor Doom.

Artificial Intelligence isn't going to kill this group - it's at much greater risk from natural stupidity. It's a bit unfair to class Cursitor Doom's artificial inanities as stupid - he obviously puts a lot of thought into being elaborately inane, but it's not a constructive activity.

Yes I bet it left its traces on the junior engineers who may not be as junior by now.