Comment by DonHopkins
4 days ago
The real question is why is your bar set so low? You're the one trying to make a rhetorical point by bragging about never having heard of all these famous widely published people you could easily google or ask an LLM about, and admitting to having limited skills reading and writing yourself. Maybe for those very reasons your entire point is wrong, but you simply aren't aware of it because you're cultivating and celebrating your ignorance instead of your curiosity?
> The real question is why is your bar set so low?
Have I misunderstood? Did you list them because they're *bad* writers?
Because everything you've written gave me the impression you thought they were good. It totally changes things if you think this is a low bar that AI is failing to cross.
Regardless of how you rank those writers: being in the top 10k of living people today means being in the top 0.0001% of the population. It means being amongst the best 3 or 4 in the city I live in, which is the largest city in Europe. Now, I don't know where you live, but considering the nearest million people around you, do you know who amongst them is the best writer? Or best anything else? Because for writers, I don't. YouTubers perhaps (there I can at least name some), but I think they (a German language course) are mostly interviewing people and I'm not clear how much writing of scripts they do.
And I don't expect current AI to be as good as even the top percentile, let alone award winners.
If I googled for those people you suggested, what would I gain? To know the biography and bibliography of a writer someone else puts on a pedestal. Out of curiosity, I did in fact later search for these names, but that doesn't make them relevant or give me a sense of why their writing is something you hold in such esteem that they are your standard against which the AI is judged — though it does increase the sense that they're what I think you think is a high bar (so why be upset AI isn't there yet?) rather than a low bar (where it actually makes sense to say it's not worth it). I can see why of those four George Will wasn't familiar, as I'm not an American and therefore don't read The Washington Post. Very Americo-centric list.
Out of curiosity (I don't know how popular UK media is wherever you live), do you know Charles Moore, Theodore Dalrymple, David Starkey, Nigel Lawson, or Paul Dacre? Without Googling.
Of course I know of Charles Moore (just not personally), and have deeply studied and benefited from his work since I was a teenager, and I've written many many Forth and English words in and about his language.
He already exists as a simulated in LLOOOOMM:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
>Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission: [...]
The rest of those people I've never heard of, but what does that prove? The real question is why do you brag about not having ever heard of people in order to support your point? What kind of a point is that, which you can only support by embodying or feigning ignorance? That's like Argument from Lack of Education. You can just google those people or ask an LLM to find out who they are. Why the obsession with "Without Googling"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44379878
> Of course I know of Charles Moore (just not personally), and have deeply studied and benefited from his work since I was a teenager, and I've written many many Forth and English words in and about his language.
That's a "no" then. Wrong Charles Moore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Moore%2C_Baron_Moore_o...
> The rest of those people I've never heard of, but what does that prove? The real question is why do you brag about not having ever heard of people in order to support your point? What kind of a point is that, which you can only support by embodying or feigning ignorance? That's like Argument from Lack of Education. You can just google those people or ask an LLM to find out who they are. Why the obsession with "Without Googling"?
Because they're the British versions of your own examples.
You don't get to be high-and-mighty with me about American journalists I've barely heard of when you've not heard of these people.
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