Bozo Bit Phrases

People like to claim things are more nuanced than they are. The truth is that you can capture 90% of the essence of something rather quickly.

One way to flip the Bozo bit on someone is to see if they use tribal affiliation phrases. These are indicators that someone hasn't though through things carefully and that they are not self-aware enough to recognize that they are displaying markers as tribal members. Worse still, often the phrase is well-known as a bozo marker, and people still use it and in doing so, reveal themselves to be particularly bozo.

Anyone sufficiently smart enough uses these trigger heuristics. Paul Graham, as an example, uses the word 'delve' as an LLM detection machine and sets the bozo bit on people who use it.

My time on the Internet has taught me to associate a few of these with a bozo:

• carceral justice / decarceration etc. etc.
• deeply unserious
• late-stage capitalism
• some people / a lot of people are disabled / sick / etc. and can't X
• enabling