Comment by drivebyhooting
15 hours ago
Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times).
Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
15 hours ago
Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times).
Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
“caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr.
This is accurate.
> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
This is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive.
Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident.
Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply.
That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back.
I consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean.
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In my experience actual experts don’t hedge because they have a perspective. They might say “I think”, but avoid weaseling.
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And sometimes that’s what trying to sound smart sounds like.
Yup. Reality is full of special cases.
"couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos."
When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.
Yep the only way out is hooks to forbid what can be detected by ast and second model to prune comments, flatten pyramids of fallback, and squash the test suite removing quirks maintaining wanted behaviors.
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Yea. I have asked it to verify my ideas with experiments sometimes. And it cheats and warps the results so that the results are reached