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: "...
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.