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Comment by ofjcihen

3 hours ago

So I’ve heard this argument before but I’ve not even seen someone demonstrate HOW the numbers are “adversarial”.

This is the crux of my argument: Zitron provides numbers and he provides a lot of them sourced from reliable and trustworthy sources. He provides counterarguments to numbers-sparse arguments by using even more actual, real numbers with a logical theory formed from them.

This should make it rather easy to dispute his claims, no? So then where are the equally rational disputes?

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ofjcihen

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jsnell  3 hours ago

Some of his numbers are rebutted all the time. It doesn't matter, because he will just ignore the rebuttals and just keep repeating the invalid or irrelevant numbers. For example, a few months ago he did some bad math with a broken spreadsheet to prove that Anthropic's ARR numbers had to be incorrect. That was quickly rebutted[0], but Zitron continued repeating the argument anyway.

Just this article has a dozen instances of numbers being used to prop up the argument. They're mostly irrelevant to whatever argument Zitron is trying to make at the time. Some others are straight up misrepresentations. HN really is not a good forum for point by point rebuttals for that many cases. Do you think there's a particularly high impact use of numbers in this article?

[0] https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034376359909130249