You may already be aware of John Baez’s “Crackpot Index”, which provides a simple tongue-in-cheek scoring system for assessing whether a research contribution to physics is likely “revolutionary.” The list contain such gems as “40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.”
In the age of large language models, we direly need something similar but for “marketing-speak.” It feels like for every company that wants to actually pitch an interesting product that might do something good for the world, there are at least three others that turned up the “vibe check” to eleven and misuse any bit of terminology they can get their hands on. Thus, a humble attempt at classifying marketing materials along with a grading rubric.
- Your concept starts with -5 points. Let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
- 10 points for “inventing” something without providing any citation, paper, or other specification.
- 10 points for each instance of a term from mathematics, physics, or the life sciences where, by rights, it should not appear.
- 20 points for doing the usual motte-and-bailey or hedging in the form of “It is not X. It is Y.”
- 20 points for ending a paragraph with pseudo-profound nonsense.
- 20 points for claiming that the product does what “nature” does or what “the universe” does.
- 20 points for referring to “emergent properties” where this is clearly not warranted.
- 20 points for each instance of dropping Ivy League namedropping.
- 30 points for having no falsifiable claims or predictions anywhere in the “technical” description.
- 40 points for each research “collaboration” that cannot be verified.
As time progresses, I am sure I will have to come up with an extended scoring. Until then, may your inbox be blissfully empty of long e-mails devoid of content.
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