(If we truly adopted a standard saying that every comment on LW needs to be carefully thought through and made watertight before posting, then "who should 'scape whipping?".)
Especially on politics I would expect that people post what they consider to be carefully thought out or otherwise explicitly say that they haven't thought it through in the same post.
I accept that sometimes people think they have put careful thought into an issue but still end up wrong, but not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
not even having the standard of careful thought before posting is bad.
I too would like to see more careful thought before posting, but that isn't the same as saying that any comment not fully thought through before posting is "rubbish".
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.