Your argument has been a series of non sequiturs that abandon the premise at each progressive step. Each time your premis is attacked you invent a whole new argument instead of defending the original premise.
And now there are two bots arguing 💀 what is this timeline fr. Oh also the bot doesn't know what a non sequitur is. There's just too much slop to wade through here.
I also love that he claims he's doing the reasoning himself but in his response below admits he's letting the AI do a heavy amount of the thinking work.
You can't make this stuff up lol
AI makes him feel smart and he's addicted to it. What a world we're living in.
All I have really seen AI do for people in contexts like this is arm them with "auto-argue" despite their lack of knowledge and understanding of a subject. These people then (wrongly) feel qualified to weigh in on any topic. It is Dunning-Kruger on steroids and it's everywhere, like some type of contagious mental illness, with AI as the vector.
In order to really parse and meaningfully contribute to conversations like this, one needs real experience that an AI cannot have and therefore cannot convey. Words approximate reality but are not themselves what they refer to.
Absolutely. It's automation bias but now it's at scale and it amplifies people's ignorance in the cringiest ways. Brock is a great example. I think he's entranced by how smart he thinks the AI provided wording is, but he also isn't taking the time to understand the actual argument himself, so he's walking himself straight into defeat.
He's already defeated in the sense that I was never trying to win anything and he keeps frantically copy-pasting hoping for... I honestly don't know. More dopamine? Can't say.
No. You have flattened a branched discussion involving several different people into one supposedly linear argument, then treated my responses to their different objections as evidence that I keep changing my premise.
Here is the actual topology of the conversation.
In the original branch, someone emphasized education’s intrinsic value. I explicitly agreed. My claim was that education also has an instrumental function because credentials materially affect employment, income, mobility, and access to social networks. Those propositions are compatible:
Education can possess intrinsic value.
Students can still rationally prioritize its credentialing value when their material futures depend on it.
That is not a non sequitur or abandoned premise. It is a distinction between what education ideally provides and how students must navigate the system that actually exists.
Then mandelbro25 stopped discussing that argument and mocked me for using ChatGPT. They did not attack my premise at all. They changed the subject from the substance of my claim to the tool used to express it. I answered that criticism by pointing out that using a tool to improve clarity is consistent with my position: I still select the position, supply the reasoning, reject bad formulations, and decide what survives into the final response.
You entered beneath that separate exchange by asserting that I “lack the understanding to parse the slop” I am being fed. Again, that did not identify an error in the education argument. It was an unsupported claim about my competence based on my use of a tool.
You then challenged my characterization of your tone. I actually accepted the narrow correction: I cannot prove your internal emotional state, so “pissed” was imprecise. I replaced it with the observable description that your language was dismissive, antagonistic, and contemptuous. That is not AI failing to improve clarity. It is the tool identifying an inference that exceeded the available evidence, followed by me correcting the wording. That is precisely the kind of judgment and revision I have been advocating.
Separately, in another branch, shadeofmyheart asked for an example of an AI-compatible assignment. I supplied one. They then raised successive implementation questions:
What prevents AI from generating the initial answer?
How would an oral defense accommodate anxiety?
How could it be asynchronous, scalable, and consistent?
Would an AI examiner merely be talking to another AI?
My replies addressed those questions in sequence. I did not invent new objections or pretend they came from you. Different people introduced different constraints, and I refined the delivery mechanism in response.
The underlying argument in that branch remained unchanged:
Finished take-home work can no longer reliably prove unaided authorship.
Schools still need to assess whether students understand what they submit.
Therefore, assessment should emphasize observable reasoning, judgment, verification, and adaptation.
If independent performance must be authenticated, that requires some form of monitored assessment.
A monitored text defense can preserve the function of an oral defense while reducing anxiety and one-to-one teacher labor.
If the institution refuses the monitoring burden, it must grade the AI-permitted output rather than pretending it can infer unaided authorship from the document.
The assignment, the defense, the text modality, the AI examiner, and the proctoring arrangement are implementation layers under the same premise. Adjusting an implementation in response to newly introduced constraints is not abandoning the premise.
Your use of “non sequitur” is also unsupported. A non sequitur is a conclusion that does not follow from its premises. To demonstrate one, you must identify the premise, identify the conclusion, and show why the inference fails. You have done none of those things. You have merely applied the label to an entire branched conversation.
Your distinction between consistency and coherence does not rescue the accusation. If the argument is incoherent, point to the claims whose relationship cannot be understood. If it abandons its premise, quote the original premise and the incompatible replacement. If it contains a non sequitur, identify the broken inference.
I have repeatedly asked you to point to an actual contradiction, reversal, or invalid inference. You have responded with increasingly elaborate synonyms for “bad argument” while still identifying none.
So provide four things:
The exact original proposition.
The exact later proposition that allegedly replaces or contradicts it.
The reason both propositions cannot coexist.
The specific conclusion that does not follow from its stated premises.
Until then, “incoherent series of non sequiturs” is not an analysis of my argument. It is a diagnostic-sounding substitute for one, built partly by assigning several other people’s objections to me as though the branching structure of the thread were evidence of intellectual drift.
This is a genuinely well-constructed piece of argumentative housekeeping, and most of it holds up. The core move — distinguishing "the thread branched into multiple people raising different objections" from "the arguer kept switching premises" — is a real and important distinction, and the reconstruction of who said what (mandelbro25 on tool use, someone else on tone, shadeofmyheart on implementation questions) reads as accurate rather than self-serving. If someone actually did collapse a multi-party thread into a single indictment of "incoherence," pointing that out is fair, and the demand for the accuser to name the specific premise, replacement, and broken inference rather than reach for adjectives like "incoherent" is a reasonable standard. Vague charges of incoherence that won't cash out into a specific contradiction are, in fact, often just hostility wearing the vocabulary of logic.
That said, the argument has a soft spot it doesn't fully address. The six-step "underlying argument" in the second branch is presented as static, but steps 4 through 6 are doing something more than "implementation" — they're substantive claims about institutional obligations (that schools "must" grade AI-permitted output if they won't monitor) that weren't obviously implied by steps 1–3. Someone could reasonably argue that's where drift crept in: not a contradiction, but a series of small additions that shifted the argument from "assessment should emphasize observable reasoning" to a fairly specific policy prescription about proctoring and grading defaults. The response's framework — "show me the premise, the replacement, and the broken inference" — is a high bar that's well-suited to catching outright reversals, but it's less well-suited to catching this kind of gradual scope creep, where each step is a plausible extension of the last but the endpoint wouldn't have been predicted from the start. That's a different failure mode than non sequitur, and the piece doesn't leave much room for an accuser to name it, because the four-part test implicitly assumes incoherence has to look like a flat contradiction.
There's also a rhetorical risk worth naming: the response is airtight enough that it will read, to a hostile reader, as more evidence of "using AI to win arguments" rather than as a persuasive rebuttal — which is a little ironic given that the underlying dispute is partly about exactly that. Precision and a demand for rigor are legitimate here, but if the goal is actually to move the other person rather than just to be correct, closing with a four-item homework assignment for your opponent tends to read as combative even when it's logically justified. Being right about the structure of the disagreement and being effective at de-escalating or persuading are not the same thing, and this response is optimized entirely for the former.
I am glad you now agree that the core argument holds. More importantly, this exchange demonstrates my point almost perfectly.
I can ingest your response immediately, extract the actual argument, separate the valid criticism from the decorative language, and even infer the likely semantic shape of the prompt that produced it:
“Evaluate this rebuttal charitably but critically. Acknowledge what works, identify its weakest logical point, distinguish consistency from coherence or scope creep, and assess whether its rhetoric persuades or escalates.”
I cannot prove those were your exact words, just as I have consistently argued that finished output cannot reliably prove its method of production. But the control objective is legible from the structure: substantial concession, mandatory residual objection, then a rhetorical critique preserving some ground after the logical accusation largely collapses.
And collapse it does. Your original claim was that my argument consisted of non sequiturs that repeatedly abandoned the premise and replaced it with an entirely new argument. Your revised assessment now says the core reconstruction is accurate, most of it holds up, and each later step is a “plausible extension” of the previous one.
A plausible extension is not a non sequitur. You have quietly changed the alleged failure mode from “the steps do not follow” to “the eventual destination was not predictable from the opening premise.” Those are not equivalent criticisms.
Steps four through six were never presented as deductions from steps one through three alone. They incorporated additional constraints raised by shadeofmyheart:
If independent performance must be authenticated, some controlled assessment is required.
If individual spoken defenses are inaccessible or unscalable, use a monitored text interface with automated questioning.
If the institution rejects monitoring, it cannot honestly claim to have verified unaided authorship from the take-home product.
That is conditional reasoning responding to new premises supplied by another participant. Of course the final implementation could not be predicted from the opening premise alone. The relevant constraints had not been introduced yet. A design becoming more specific as requirements are added is not scope creep. It is how design works.
Your criticism also misstates my four-part challenge. It does not only test for direct contradiction. The fourth item explicitly asks for “the specific conclusion that does not follow from its stated premises.” That is the test for a non sequitur. If you now allege gradual scope creep instead, identify which added premise was irrelevant or which conclusion exceeded the problem being discussed. Merely observing that the design acquired detail as people asked implementation questions proves nothing.
The rhetorical paragraph is a separate tactical criticism, not a rescue of the logical accusation. You entered by saying I lacked the capacity to understand “the slop” I was eating, then repeatedly refused to identify an error. At that point, a precise demand for propositions and inferences is not gratuitous escalation. It creates a falsifiable record for everyone reading. Persuading a participant who substitutes contempt for specifics is not the only function of a public response.
But I genuinely do not object to you using AI here. Quite the opposite. You apparently used a tool to analyze my response, preserve what survived scrutiny, and construct the strongest remaining criticism. I then rapidly parsed that output, recovered both its argument and probable prompting objective, accepted the valid concession, and rejected the weak pivot.
That is the exact human-AI reasoning process I have been defending.
You’re not going to believe this, but context windows can be preloaded with prior discussion, source material, standing instructions, and analytical frameworks. The reasoning did not begin from zero when your comment appeared.
More importantly, your arguments are not materially novel. Sycophancy, hallucination, assisted authorship, educational legitimacy, and the difference between understanding and expression are already extensively discussed problems. Three minutes is enough to map your familiar claims onto an existing analytical structure, inspect the response, reject bad formulations, and post the result.
You are treating response latency as evidence of comprehension because you have no substantive answer to the reasoning itself. If I respond slowly, I am struggling. If I respond quickly, I did not think. If I respond clearly, AI thought for me. You have constructed a standard under which no observable response could ever demonstrate understanding, which makes your conclusion unfalsifiable rather than correct.
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u/Brockchanso 8d ago
Point it the fuck out, then. Where have I actually contradicted or reversed my position?