Post #1362072
2026-04-03 03:20 UTC
Replies (1)
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-04-04 17:42
Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to [3-satisfiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem) in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.