Code Smells and Conspiracy Smells

In software, there's a concept called "code smell". Suppose you are an expert software engineer. You can tell, just by looking at a code fragment, if it is likely to have a bug. The formatting and layout are a giveaway. Poorly written code tends to have bad indentation, unclear variable names, and other obvious flaws.

I also have developed a technique called "conspiracy smell". I can tell, just by briefly reading a random webpage, if the content is accurate. If it is a good article, then it will be clearly written and have clean logic. If it's a bad article or pro-State troll article, then I can also tell quickly. I can tell just from reading a few sentences and looking at the logic.

For example, the "income tax conspiracy debunker" or "Federal Reserve conspiracy debunker" websites tend to be incoherent gibberish. They basically amount to "The Supreme Court said the income tax is acceptable. Therefore, it's fine." The best anti-income tax websites explain the moral argument and not the legal or Constitutional argument. The morality of the income tax is obvious, whereas the legal arguments are incredibly obfuscated.

Amusingly, sometimes there are large articles that appear to be a concatenation of two articles by different people. I saw an article that had a great bit on Zero Point Energy, followed by something incomprehensible. The Zero Point Energy bit was logically written, and the other bit was horrible. It was as if it was written by two different people. There a few intelligent articles on Zero Point Energy, combined with lots of gibberish articles. The few intelligent articles make me say "This is seriously worth investigating!". The large volume of gibberish on Zero Point Energy makes me say "Something is being covered up!"

As a conspiracy theorist/factist, it is very useful to be able to tell if a random webpage is useful or nonsense.