That right there is the mentality that is going to drive me into a hole. Engineers are already grumpy enough dealing with asinine human bullshit that doesn't translate into reality. Seeing blatant slop judged by blatant slop (and it is, in this case, extremely blatant on both ends) and then saying "geez if you're criticising this you must be butt-hurt, move on" is so mind-blowingly frustrating. Like you can't even start to reason with someone like that. Yes, the author of the comments clearly believes other submissions made sense and engaged in good faith with the competition parameters, and that those deserve to win. Are we stupid?

We tried! In good faith! We put a lot of time into articulating ourselves clearly! We even pretended to be nice, reminding ourselves to be charitable and that we might be missing something! And like... it's normal every once in awhile for someone to opine dumbly, but when it's all the time and the perpetrators are people who just do not care that they are spewing glorified Bayes-slop into the universe and then being rewarded for it by people who both can't tell the difference and don't understand why that's a problem... we all get really tired, really quickly, and we want to disengage.

Personally I have zero tolerance for this kind of lazy-ass approach to reality. I'm seeing it increasingly at work. I'm seeing it increasingly in corpo sludge. I'm seeing it increasingly in social interactions. I'm seeing it explode on social media. I want to engage in life-affirming activities with people who have actual minds that they cultivate and use. I will not waste precious time and attention on communities that tolerate slop. If you want me to care, communicate with me in good faith. I don't think we should be kind or forgiving about it. Kaggle got exactly one strike on this, now they're dead to me forever. Same with open source contributors. Same with content creators. Out of basic ethics I need to give multiple strikes to employees who report to me (and hold myself accountable for their actions first), but exactly one strike for leadership above. Trust is precious. We need to hold one another accountable. If that burns some bridges so be it. Enough is enough and we do in fact know better.