Comment by dmm
6 hours ago
Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group.
In any case, two things can be simultaneously true:
1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop features faster than they can be deployed. 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus.
Or just goomba fallacy
til https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
I learned here like a week ago so I'm here to evangelize.
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That’s kind of just strawman with an origin story isn’t it?
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Sometimes there are two groups of people who have different opinions that don't interact, but given the extent they take up the same platform and don't seem to see each other, I'm not sure it is really a fallacy even then.
First, it becomes possible for people who have a double standard to hide behind this. One can try to track an individual's stance, but a lot of internet etiquette seems to be based on the idea of not looking up a person's history to see if they are being contradictory. (And while being hypocritical doesn't necessarily invalidate an argument, it can help to indicate when someone is arguing it bad faith and it is a waste of time as someone will simply use different axioms to reach otherwise contradictory conclusions when they favor each.)
Second, I think there is the ability to call out a group as being hypocritical, even when there are two sub groups. That one group supports A generally and another group supports B generally (and assuming that A + B is hypocritical), but they stop supporting it when it would bring them into conflict indicates a level of acceptance by the change in behavior. Each individual is too hard to measure this (maybe they are tired today, or distracted, or didn't even see it), but as a group, we can still measure the overall direction.
So if a website ends up being very vocally in support of two contradictory positions, I think there is still a valid argument to be made about contradicting opinions, and the goomba fallacy is itself a fallacy.
Edit: Removed example, might be too distracting to bring up an otherwise off topic issue as an example.
I believe in A, I don't take a strong position on B, I am in coalition with people who believe in B and don't take a strong position on A, we both believe in C, D, E, and F, which some other people believe in with differing weights. Browbeating me about position B (or, the most useless kind of Internet banter, complaining about me and my hypocritical position on A+B to your friends who oppose both in a likewise contradictory way, in some venue I've never heard of) is not about making people reevaluate positions, it's about negative factionalism. The only reason it might not fit the familiar categorization of "fallacy" is that you would never use it in rational debate, either in arguing with another person or in reasoning out your own position.
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> 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus.
Steering a LLM also requires deep focus. Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic or have a CVE named after your project.
How can it? You prompt it, then wait minutes+ for it to come back. It's the opposite of flow state.
I get much better results the more thought I put into crafting my prompt. including using llms to help create that prompt. There's definitely a declining rate of return on that time, but thinking about the problem and carefully describing the context can take fairly deep thought. I do think it's in shorter bursts than when doing all of the work, but I get that same feeling of 'bah, where was I?' if I get interrupted while creating the prompt for a more complex feature. On the other hand, I spend a lot less time in flow state while debugging - it's way easier to describe a bug to an llm (often can just paste in the exception or link to error log).
I'm using my ADHD hyper focus skills while flagging issues that the LLM is doing.
Reading 10x more code than before puts me straight into the zone. (In a language that I find interesting: Elixir)
My own process is improving so much that I had only one bug last week that was fixed immediately after the error tracker caught.
But yeah I feel more tired sooner. So it's oneto three hyper focus zones per day, just like before.
The difference is that I enter faster, and now I'm not afraid of leaving the task and resuming later, since I can just ask for a summary of what we did so far.
I'm using two different models from two different providers to cross check the work tho.
I'm very good with bad smells I guess, after years supervising less experienced developers since early days in my long career.
It isn't exactly flow - but at when the prompt comes back it forces me to think. Flow is about getting into a state where I'm thinking so this is surprisingly similar. The prompt is helpful because it gives me a place to focus: does the proposed changes make sense (this is much smaller than the entire code base), and given this is done: do I know anything else that was missed.
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Flow comes after when you verify what it did...