Comment by futhey
4 hours ago
When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
>quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently.
How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
The smarter thing to do would be to steelman the original position and not assume that the weakest of counterarguments — stated confidently and without much further analysis — sufficiently refute it.
I like this notion of being contrarian in what it means to be contrarian.
Was not lost on me...
1 reply →
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It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.
Totally, so many people like to bring up a counter-argument and expect you to fully disarm it, but very few people will justify whether their argument is actually relevant or reasonable to the discussion at hand.
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