I've got more rules of thumb than I have thumbs to hold them with

Yet another adage

We all know

Never argue with a fool, people might not know the difference. Mark Twain (attrib.)

To which be added, recently,

Never argue with a MAGA true believer

(Although that may be just a subset of the first.)

Some adages are more concrete

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. (Douglas MacArthur, attrib.)

Others are general enough to adapt to various situations, like

Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty but the pig likes it. (George Bernard Shaw (attrib.)

applies to the broad category of bullshitters.

I’ll add one

Never argue with a person with savant syndrome (formerly known as an “idiot” savant—an adjective now disfavored) within his or her area of expertise.

Think Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rainman. Don’t bet the farm that he doesn’t know how many matches were just dropped on the floor.

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A special case is presented by AI, which can be both a bullshitter and affected with savant syndrome at the same time. Its answers are likely to be highly specific, well argued and presented with all the authority of a papal bull.

In an interactive environment, it is easy to fall into a rabbit hole with an AI interlocutor. It’s first instinct is often right. Sometimes it takes two or more swings to score a run. But after a few, it will. drift further and further into trouble.

That is the time to tackle the problem manually or at least seek other counsel. I had that experience tonight with plotting a map. Most had been turning out as expected but a few had distorted geometries. Oh, the fixes we tried, without success. Finally, I want to the source file and reloaded it to a different database and discovered the root problem I had been working with a simplified version. King County, which has 1,191 points to define its boundaries in one file had only 5 in the other.

So, problem solved, right?

The chief cause of problems is solutions. (Eric Severeid, attrib.)

Of course not. Now it takes forever to render a plot because it is. not longer simplified. But wait! I have a beast with cores and GPUs to burn, so I’ll just multi-thread.

You will have guessed how that went. I’m in dependency hell. A twisty maze of passages, all different. What an adventure.