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Comment by mapontosevenths

15 hours ago

> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.

Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.

7 comments

mapontosevenths

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Someone1234  14 hours ago

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.

  • JW_00000  13 hours ago

    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.

    • Someone1234  10 hours ago

      You aren't arguing a "contrary" to what I actually wrote above. You're arguing with a strawman Redditor, and a point adjacent to what I was posting about - experts responding to topics within their actual realm of expertise.

      So I won't be addressing this, for those reasons and others.

  • nostrebored  13 hours ago

    In my experience actual experts don’t hedge because they have a perspective. They might say “I think”, but avoid weaseling.

    • mapontosevenths  12 hours ago

      My experience has been very much the opposite of yours.

      To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets.

      Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question?

      A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication.