Comment by beepbooptheory
1 day ago
Is it that imperative voice is necessarily baity? Or is it simply the case that we can't be outwardly critical of AI itself at all anymore? I know your working hard dang, but things are getting a little fuzzy around here lately..
Oh for sure it is. "Please stop $Fooing" and its more aggressive cousin, "Stop $Fooing" (not to mention "For the love of god would you all please stop $Fooing or I will $Bar you" and sundry variations) belong to a family of internet linkbait tropes.
> is it simply the case that we can't be outwardly critical of AI itself at all anymore
You need only, er, delve into any large HN thread about AI to see that this is very far from the case! especially the more generic threads about opinion pieces and so on.
I think the air on HN is too cynical and curmudgeonly towards new tech right now, and that worries me. Not that healthy skepticism is unwarranted (it's fine of course) but for HN itself to be healthy, there ought to be more of a balance. Cranky comments about "slop"* ought not to be the main staple here—what we want is curious conversation about interesting things—but right now it's not only the main staple, I feel like we're eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
But I'm not immune from the bias I'm forever pointing out to other people (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134194), and that's probably why we have opposite perceptions of this!
* (yes it annoys me too, that's not my point here though)
I'll admit, I don't know if I understand the point, regardless of our differing biases here. Curious or critical conversation does not itself guarantee an even number of yaysayers and naysayers to a given topic, and it seems a doomed project to try to make it so. I guess I like to come here because it feels like a certain reflection of my peers, where sometimes my views put me in the minority, sometimes not, and thats ok! I understand policing tone and baityness and flamewar, I understand limiting outright politics as much as possible, and I empathize with your singular, probably pretty wretched perspective to The Discourse right now as ever; but to have "balance" for the sake of itself, at perhaps the cost of, lets say, editorial freedom in this instance does feel like a change, one even that could maybe be articulated in the guidelines (although I am at a loss personally for how to formulate it). I just can't help but think of how different this all would be if the topic in question was, e.g., climate change, or vaccination, or modern slavery.
But regardless, its not really important for me to understand, and this place has been here way before me, and will perhaps be here way after! For me personally, its at least enlightening to know this is the official stance and will help me adjust my future participation! Thanks for the time.
The goal isn't an "equal number of yaysayer and naysayers". I agree that would be doomed for a lot of reasons. Rather my complaint about these threads is that there's too much reflexive naysaying in the form of shallow dismissals, indignant denunciations, snarky formulations and so on.
If these commenters were arriving at their naysaying through curious exploration, that would be fine, but in that case we'd see indications of this in the comments—they would be lighter and more playful, would contain interesting details, and so on. This is unfortunately pretty rare among the naysayers. What I'm seeing instead is a lot of cranky curmudgeonism. Cranky curmudgeonism is a different internet game than the one we want HN to be playing.
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Yeah, exactly. Looking through these, I think my original title is probably slightly better.
I think there's a lot more information in this one. Before I decide if I want to click or not, I know it's about Yann Lecun and LLMs at least. Where as Please Stop Talking About AGI could get me anything from Roko's Basilisk to a PSA.