sam's Shortform

sam

This is a special post for quick takes by sam. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I am confused about why this post on the ethics of eating honey is so heavily downvoted.

It sparked a bunch of interesting discussion in the comments (e.g. this comment by Habryka and the resulting arguments on how to weight non-human animal experiences)

It resulted in at least one interesting top-level rebuttal post.

I assume it led indirectly to this interesting short post also about how to weight non-human experiences. (this might not have been downstream of the honey post but it's a weird coincidence if isn't)

I think the original post certainly had flaws, but the fact that it's resulted in so much interesting and productive discussion and yet has been punished by the karma system seems weird to me.

I've fixed the 97% statistic! I agree that was a stupid error to make. It wasn't from LLMs and one bit of evidence for this is that the statistic isn't online anymore, so an LLM wouldn't find it. In fact, I remembered the statistic from an old round of high school debate, and emailed someone to find the link. I would be happy to send you an email of the correspondence if you are skeptical.

I am quite certain that I did not use LLM's in composing the post. Now, I don't think the mere example of that joke is very convincing evidence that I u... (read more)

9gwern1y

It is in fact a mundane topic, because you are surrounded by AI slop and people relying heavily on ChatGPT writing, making it a mundane every day observation infiltrating even the heights of wordcel culture (I've now started seeing blatant ChatGPTisms in the New Yorker and New York Times), which is why you are wrong to bend over backwards to require extraordinary evidence for what have become ordinary claims (and also why your tangents and evasions are so striking). So, I am again going to ignore those, and will ask you again - you were sure that BB was not using ChatGPT, despite the linguistic tells and commonness of it: [...] I am still waiting for an answer here.

5Mitchell_Porter1y

Let me first try to convey how this conversation appears from my perspective. I don't think I've ever debated directly with you about anything, but I have an impression of you as doing solid work in the areas of your interest. Then, I run across you alleging that BB is using AI to write some of his articles. This catches my attention because I do keep an eye on BB's work. Furthermore, your reason for supposing that he is using AI seems bizarre to me - you think his (very occasional) "sneering" is too "dumb and cliche" to be the work of human hands. Let's look at an example: [...] If that strikes you as something that a human being would never spontaneously write, I don't know what to say. Surely human comedians say similar things hundreds of times every month? It's also exactly the kind of thing that a smart-aleck "science communicator" with a progressive audience might say, don't you think? BB may be neither of those things, but he's a popular Gen-Z philosophy blogger who was a high-school debater, so he's not a thousand light-years from either of those universes of discourse. I had a look at your other alleged example of AI writing, and I also found other callouts from your recent reddit posts. Generally I think your judgments were reasonable, but not in this case.