Comment by sublinear
10 hours ago
> “I’m so smart” does not impress people who can reproduce your brilliance by asking Claude for “insights, no mistakes.”
I'm not convinced. I'm old enough to remember when people said similar about previous waves of tech (search engines, smartphones, etc.) replacing everything from books and handwriting to thinking. People were talking about "the wisdom of the crowd" and living a "quantified life" as recently as a decade ago.
Being "smart" is not only highly dependent on context beyond what computers can sense or reasonably "live in" (even when you're not querying), but also timing and deeper insight. AI has a very very long way to go if we're even keeping that as a goal for it.
I think it's more often the case that anyone trying to be "smart" can't hide how dumb they are. You're right that nobody is impressed by ego-fragile defensive snark or try-hard quotes. I don't think they ever were though?
They weren’t enough to impress others, but I think they were enough to feel impressive, which is almost as pleasant psychologically.