Stupid Filter

I believe I've linked to this in the past, but golly, I get a kick out of it—and it's coming soon!

What the StupidFilter is about: "The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale."

From the FAQ: "Q: Isn't filtering stupidity elitist?
A: Yes. Yes, it is. That's sort of the whole point.
Q: Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?
A: No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.
Q: How do you rate stupidity?
Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid,"—based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity."

If you're going to parse stupidity, the Internet is a logical place to work.

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