True, but wedrifid was not invoking that following definition as evidence; he was invoking the presence of scare quotes, and as an independent data point; and he in fact agreed that the summary paragraph was insufficient to learn the point of the post—hence why I criticized the summary (conditional on wedrifid’s claim) for failing to do its job (of either summarizing or making clear what you have to read the article to know).
Edit: Wow that’s a big tangle. Here’s a recap:
machrider: *reads summary*; *makes (possibly) bad point in response* wedrifid: “What a stupid point, you obviously just read the summary and not the whole post.” me: “Then it’s a bad summary.” wedrifid: “Even so, it had scare quotes.” me: “Whoa, let’s not overestimate what they can do.”
Eh, scare quotes by themselves are a lot less informative than you might think./
The scare quotes were not “by themselves”—they were directly followed by a definition.
True, but wedrifid was not invoking that following definition as evidence; he was invoking the presence of scare quotes, and as an independent data point; and he in fact agreed that the summary paragraph was insufficient to learn the point of the post—hence why I criticized the summary (conditional on wedrifid’s claim) for failing to do its job (of either summarizing or making clear what you have to read the article to know).
Edit: Wow that’s a big tangle. Here’s a recap:
machrider: *reads summary*; *makes (possibly) bad point in response*
wedrifid: “What a stupid point, you obviously just read the summary and not the whole post.”
me: “Then it’s a bad summary.”
wedrifid: “Even so, it had scare quotes.”
me: “Whoa, let’s not overestimate what they can do.”
They are sufficient to remove the meaning machrider used as a straw man from the summary entirely. I think you are being silly.