The interesting part is not the intro about a literary conflict inside mid-19th-century Danish literary circles, but the quotes from Kirkegaard that seem to apply to our modern situation, and to social media, which did not and could not exist in 1840s, but the dynamics of which was already visible in the literary society. The crowd of opinion without much substance, with the desire to stand out, but also a desire to deride anything that does not align with their notion of proper. Nothing very new, but amplified by the power of the printed word.
> Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop.
> What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.”4 Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.”
> Out of this fragmentation arises something new – the public, a hollow substitute for genuine judgment. Where inward conviction falters, collective opinion steps in to bind the pieces together. But the bond it forges is thin and corrosive. Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests, functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.”
> For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement. Committees, petitions, surveys – these are less tools of participation than props in a play where everyone can feel involved. “Now everyone can have an opinion,” Kierkegaard quips, “but they have to band together numerically in order to have one. Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion.”
> What holds this abstraction together is envy, the “negative unifying principle” of modern life.8 Envy does not look upward; it glances sideways, measuring its own worth by comparison, punishing excellence for the discomfort it causes. Yet even as it resents distinction, it cannot help but crave it. The result is a paradox of modern identity: in seeking to assert ourselves, we demand validation from a phantom audience. “That is the leveling process at its lowest” Kierkegaard warns, “for it always equates itself to the divisor by means of which everyone is reduced to a common denominator.”
Always happy to discuss existentialism, but I'm not going to read through an AI generated article. The other comment I wrote today was me recommending Borges to people!
Article is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that".
I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length
It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.
The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.
Same. I believe Word and most other word processors and desktop publishing applications convert standard keyboard-typed hyphens to em- or en-dashes automatically, and have for decades.
particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.
ZeroGPT is a gimmick. Just last month it flagged my paper as AI and I wrote the thing myself. How is it coming up with that 84%? Seems like snakeoil to me. Even the academic department at my Uni agreed and admitted they cannot use any of these AI checkers in actual academic hearings. They are akin to dowsing rods.
If only there was a way to find out the truth. But who has the appetite for that these days? Or the appetite for the effort required?
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.
Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.
The interesting part is not the intro about a literary conflict inside mid-19th-century Danish literary circles, but the quotes from Kirkegaard that seem to apply to our modern situation, and to social media, which did not and could not exist in 1840s, but the dynamics of which was already visible in the literary society. The crowd of opinion without much substance, with the desire to stand out, but also a desire to deride anything that does not align with their notion of proper. Nothing very new, but amplified by the power of the printed word.
> Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop.
> What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.”4 Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.”
> Out of this fragmentation arises something new – the public, a hollow substitute for genuine judgment. Where inward conviction falters, collective opinion steps in to bind the pieces together. But the bond it forges is thin and corrosive. Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests, functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.”
> For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement. Committees, petitions, surveys – these are less tools of participation than props in a play where everyone can feel involved. “Now everyone can have an opinion,” Kierkegaard quips, “but they have to band together numerically in order to have one. Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion.”
> What holds this abstraction together is envy, the “negative unifying principle” of modern life.8 Envy does not look upward; it glances sideways, measuring its own worth by comparison, punishing excellence for the discomfort it causes. Yet even as it resents distinction, it cannot help but crave it. The result is a paradox of modern identity: in seeking to assert ourselves, we demand validation from a phantom audience. “That is the leveling process at its lowest” Kierkegaard warns, “for it always equates itself to the divisor by means of which everyone is reduced to a common denominator.”
And folks claim cancel culture is new smh
Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition we are discussing em-dashes. Peak HN.
Always happy to discuss existentialism, but I'm not going to read through an AI generated article. The other comment I wrote today was me recommending Borges to people!
[flagged]
1 reply →
If I want to ask AI about something I'd ask AI about something, not read someone else doing it
>Instead of discussing Kierkegaard or universality of human condition
Why didn't you discuss these?
[dead]
Article is full of AI tells. "The two men shared surface-level similarities.", "Not X but Y", and em-dashes everywhere. I wish that people would write articles themselves, with their own style, if they expect people to read it.
I doubt it. It's the house magazine of a a Christian sect (the Bruderhof Anabaptists), and it also needs a firmer editor. There were sections that stuck out to me as I read it where I was like "Claude would have caught that".
I wish people would stop keying in on em-dashes. They might be a tell on message boards and Twitter, but lots of writers use them heavily and have for decades.
By itself it's not a tell but combined with all else it's hard to pass by. Author's other article from 2025 has less than half the dashes and it's the same length
3 replies →
to your point, a book i had as a kid in chicago suburbia has a section on hyphens and dashes
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/to...
It’s not just emdashes it’s emdashes coupled with everything else that’s a tell. Only marketing has been using “it’s not X, it’s Y” and not good non/fiction writing. People should be keying in to help others discern generative text, regardless of however annoying you find it.
The identifying and complaining of LLM generated writing is just desserts IMO of all the LLM evangelism going on.
6 replies →
i would expect emdashes in a professionally published website.
Same. I believe Word and most other word processors and desktop publishing applications convert standard keyboard-typed hyphens to em- or en-dashes automatically, and have for decades.
particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.
1 reply →
84% likely human on zerogpt, but you could have done that yourself.
ZeroGPT is a gimmick. Just last month it flagged my paper as AI and I wrote the thing myself. How is it coming up with that 84%? Seems like snakeoil to me. Even the academic department at my Uni agreed and admitted they cannot use any of these AI checkers in actual academic hearings. They are akin to dowsing rods.
1 reply →
If only there was a way to find out the truth. But who has the appetite for that these days? Or the appetite for the effort required?
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.
Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.
[flagged]
This is Søren, not Emil.
I know nobody reads the things posted here before commenting, but this is pretty egregious.
Why spend money on tokens to process linked text when you can comment off the headline?
3 replies →