To be honest, I've read plenty of articles that read like those examples: superficially they seemed to make sense, but when you pay attention to the logic behind it, it makes no sense. And those were articles written by real people, by journalists.
And even scientists often seem to write a bunch of meaningless filler that feels scientific in their papers, presumably because that kind of text needs to go in that place in their paper.
Another thing, from the article:
"Simple correlations also seem sufficient to capture most polite conversation talk, such as the weather is nice, how is your mother’s illness, and damn that other political party."
You know how hard I had to work at that? I used to be incapable of small talk or maintaining a conversation. I could talk only in those "deep structures" but struggled to put that in sentences that formed a natural part of a conversation. I worked hard at those "simple correlations"; they were not so simple for me.
A key to smalltalk is to understand the game that's being played. When you're talking about something technical, the point is to discover and deliver useful insights on the subject at hand. When you're doing smalltalk, the point is to make the other feel comfortable and accommodated, to entertain, and be entertained. Therefore, it's more about trying to understand what the other person is feeling (this is usually a matter of looking at body language, imagining what's going on in their lives) then it is about delivering useful insight. Usually, if in doubt, listening attentively and trying to work out what makes the other person tick is a productive strategy.
I've often felt like an alien anthropologist in conversations. Even if I was aware of the game and saw what's going on, I wasn't part of it. I needed an extra processing step that made me always too late to say the right thing.
I'm suddenly wondering if my problem might be related to my youngest son's speech problem. When he was 3, he couldn't speak sentences; his sentences were just 3 meaningful words in a row. He never babbled, unlike his best friend, who always babbled in long, incoherent Trumpian sentences. He got special speech therapy for half a year which helped immensely, and now, at 4, he makes excellent sentences, if a bit staccato and clumsy, and certainly without any kind of natural flow.
He never babbles, though. I think his Markov chain is broken and he replaced it with an rule based system that he reworked to produce language.
I have a feeling that an alien anthropologist approach is ultimately better than the reactive approach - I grew up with an autistic brother who was nonetheless socially capable, simply through distilling social problems into a set of hard rules. Sometimes you get edge cases and he gets into trouble, but for 90% of the time, he was actually way more socially able than I was, simply by having a better-formed understanding, less overwhelmed by immediacy and assumptions.
You need a degree of alien anthropology to be able to respond to what's really important in a conversation - an extremely socially capable deaf friend of mine pointed out, for instance, that body language is more important than verbal content in most casual interactions. These kind of insights are kinda hard to gain from a neurotypical, non-deaf perspective like mine, because you're a bit like a fish that doesn't realize he's swimming in water.
Oh, body language! My 4 year old son is extremely expressive with his face and posture, possibly because of his verbal problems. Even when he could barely talk at all, he was very good at expressing what he wanted or needed. He's so expressive that I've always thought he should become an actor.
My older son, who is verbally very strong, is often nearly expressionless.
One thing I've noticed is that it's reasonably common for news articles to just casually drop in facts that completely contradict whatever narrative the waffle is pushing, and almost no-one notices. (Wouldn't be too surprised if I only noticed it a small proportion of the time.) People just seem to come away believing the waffle anyway. It seems somewhat likely that even the Pultizer committee has been doing the same too.
And even scientists often seem to write a bunch of meaningless filler that feels scientific in their papers, presumably because that kind of text needs to go in that place in their paper.
Another thing, from the article: "Simple correlations also seem sufficient to capture most polite conversation talk, such as the weather is nice, how is your mother’s illness, and damn that other political party."
You know how hard I had to work at that? I used to be incapable of small talk or maintaining a conversation. I could talk only in those "deep structures" but struggled to put that in sentences that formed a natural part of a conversation. I worked hard at those "simple correlations"; they were not so simple for me.