Statements truly worthy of noted shockmeister Stuart Smalley.

In addition to advice you can find in your grandmother's needlepoint, you'll also find this type:

Oh boy, I bet this one's going to be a real live wire. I wonder what kind of crazy and offensive tweets we're going to get on this account.

So they promise a lot, but quite often deliver poorly remembered quotes from provocateurs who are now deceased, advice found on Precious Moments bookmarks, and AOL chat room filler.

I guess it depends on whether the priority is on getting your listeners to quickly understand your arguments so you can move on to make your point without having to retell and explain a story about caves and fires and shadows that some of them probably won't be familiar with, or whether the priority is to let people know that you read Plato once.

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"Today I learned he was a philosopher and not a type of modeling clay."

Also a warning flag is anyone who brings up the Prisoner's Dilemma game theory scenario, which in theory is often relevant as a useful insight into discussing how people make decisions, but in practice is almost always inserted clumsily as a badge of behavioral expertise or something. Ten percent of the time people bring it up because they think it is relevant, and 90 percent of the time because they just read about it in Discover Magazine or Mental Floss.

There's always the possibility that someone who brings up one of these things genuinely feels it's the best tool to explain what they're getting at, but once they start to pile up, there can be no mistake. If someone mentions the Allegory of the Cave, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Occam's razor and Schroedinger's cat in the course of their argument, just drop everything and get the hell out of there before they start telling you the fable about the scorpion and the frog.

Don't know if I'm remembering this one right.

Even if you don't have the condition and you're just reading or listening for curiosity's sake, there's not really anything to be learned from people who are certain they have ADHD or Asperger's no matter what those lying doctors say, unless you want to learn what they imagine life is like for an ADHD or Asperger's sufferer.

Well-meaning websites like WebMD sometimes make things worse by printing bullet-point lists of symptoms for various conditions. The intent is for you to see if you have a bunch of symptoms, and if so, go to a professional and get officially diagnosed and then treated. But I guess there's a bit of human nature that makes many of us want to treat it like a Seventeen magazine quiz where we add up points (1 point for A, 2 points for B, 3 points for C ...), and if we score 15 or more, we're schizophrenic!

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"Oooh, looks like Susie has PTSD!"

Sure, sometimes it may be helpful for individuals to get coping tips from others with similar problems without going through intimidating medical professionals, but most people who like to speak at length about their self-diagnosis to strangers aren't just looking for help, they're looking to give it, including explaining authoritatively what the condition does or doesn't involve, saying what everyone in the same condition should do and even prescribing drugs sometimes.

Even if you believe in the helpfulness of Internet psychological self-diagnosis, I'm sure we can at least agree that someone self-diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma should be immediately sent to a doctor where they can hopefully find out it's just a cold. And that you should know just from the title that this one is going to be weird:

OK, yes, hair loss can be one of the symptoms, but usually a person's primary concern is the unimaginable pain.

Most of the time when you see/hear this phrase, it's in response to a question that isn't being asked. It appears in people's signatures, taglines, profiles and other places where it's theoretically the first introduction you have to a person. It's like being introduced to someone at a social function and having them shout, "Damn right I'm female! No need to adjust your glasses!" before you have even said hi.

It can be a little insulting that they assume everyone they run into is going to have that question in their heads -- "Can it really be a woman I am seeing?" -- but OK, let's say they're in a particularly sheltered environment full of males and that question actually comes up a lot. The trouble is that they rarely stop at answering this first unasked question and usually come up with an entire imaginary interview you are giving them, which they are happy to provide anticipated answers for.

Sure, maybe some people have asked them some of these questions, but I find it hard to imagine someone asking, "Will you put up with my pervertedness?"

Also, I don't know if this applies to other games, but in my time in World of Warcraft, I noticed that anyone who goes out of their way to introduce themselves with "Yeah, I'm a girl, believe it or not!" is a terrible player. I'm not saying girls are terrible players, I'm saying girls whose first statement upon meeting anyone is "I'm a girl! Hold on to your monocle!" is terrible. And if someone brings it up as their first statement, it is inevitable they will bring it up many, many times in the future, including sometimes as an excuse when they get everyone killed ("lol I guess my boobs got in the way!").

Here's a good example of someone who appears to be terrible at Skyrim, somehow.

And the response:

There's nothing more deflating to one of these types than a female in the same field who is actually good at it.