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I've started calling this argumentum ad artificialis. Pretty similar to an ad hominem attack. The purpose of an argument is to present certain premises and show
by chungusamongus 3mo ago
I've started calling this argumentum ad artificialis. Pretty similar to an ad hominem attack. The purpose of an argument is to present certain premises and show how they lead to a certain conclusion. Dismissing something on the basis of the style in which the argument is presented has nothing at all to do with the validity or soundness of an argument. It is a lazy nonsequitur. It sounds like an LLM wrote this? So what? Is the argument good or not?
- wk_end 3mo agoBut at no point did they say that the argument was invalid; just that they couldn't stand reading it.
- chungusamongus 3mo ago[flagged]
- achierius 3mo agoThey're engaging with the writing. Talking about it as if it's just an "argument" is reductive; this isn't highschool debate club
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThen why are you trying to debate me?
- hightrix 3mo agoIt may be lazy, but that doesn't make it any more accurate. Take a writing by someone using the tone of Kevin from The Office, “Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” Would you read an argument written in this tone regardless of the content, topic, or position? You write for your audience.
- chungusamongus 3mo ago[flagged]
- wk_end 3mo agoA few years ago I tried to make it through The Critique of Pure Reason, but had to stop because - as many people famously do - I found Kant's writing too abstruse. In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer. No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.
- skeledrew 3mo ago> a better writer That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.
- wk_end 3mo agoNah, Kant's considered a notoriously poor writer among philosophers. Obviously opinions may differ, but Derek Parfit [0], for instance, wrote: “It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'” (Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!) In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing". FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit
- chungusamongus 3mo agoFwiw I am much more impressed with the sophistication of someone's argument than i am their writing style. Kant has contributed much more than parfit depsite the abstract nature of his writing and it's not even close.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoKant is a better writer than the vast majority of writers. The problem is, the ideas he is trying to articulate are incredibly abstract. Hegel is like this too
- bilalnpe 3mo agoYeah, no one is obligated to engage with it. They did not dismiss the argument but refused to engage with it. This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoAnd the signal I'm sending is, when I see people do that, I find it to be lazy and totally irrelevant to the content.
- achierius 3mo agoMan, it's not an argument. Nobody is paying us to read this. If your argument sucks to read, people aren't going to read it - this has always been true, it's nothing new.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoI didn't think it "sucked" to read. Anyway that's an aesthetic qualm, not a counterargument. Also the story has a disclaimer saying it was written by deepseek. I might have an issue if they were being deceptive. But that's clearly not the case. You people just like finding arbitrary things to complain about.
- skippyfish 3mo agoDiscourse as we know it doesn't work if the cost of producing an infinite supply of arguments is essentially zero, while the cost of reading them and arguing with them remains high. Unless you want my LLM to get back to your LLM. And this is a problem on HN today. There are powerful incentives to generate provocative opinion pieces just for clicks. I've seen websites on HN that seemingly took the human entirely out of the equation and just post a nearly identical op-ed every day on a fixed schedule. What's the point of engaging with that?
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThe cost of reading this story is not high; you are just lazy and easily distracted. It took 5 minutes to read. You took more time to respond to this comment than it took to simply read the story.
- thatjoeoverthr 3mo agoOh, you think it’s just this story? The cost of reading slop is infinity. No thanks.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThat's circular reasoning
- thatjoeoverthr 3mo agoIt’s not. It’s very simple, but you like to say “circular reasoning”. Maybe you heard it in debate class. There is unlimited slop. I decide what to read _without reading it_. So do you. I have deemed this unworthy. It’s more fun to insult it than to read it. Every day is a gift.
- bookofjoe 3mo ago>It’s more fun to insult it than to read it. That belongs in the HN Hall of Fame
- jazzpush2 3mo agoIf you expect my effort to read your work, I expect your effort to write it. Really that simple.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoYou are assuming because someone used an llm to help articulate the argument, that it did not require effort to formulate. That's fallacious.
- blakeman8192 3mo agoThe part that I personally find difficult is that I can’t easily gauge the amount of human effort put in. For all we know, the author could have simply prompted “write a short story about an LLM exploiting its own runtime” for a similar result. I’d bet that by now, LLMs worldwide generate more text in a second than I can read in the rest of my lifetime. What is the immeasurably unbalanced ratio (let alone effort and quality) of that text to the original human thought and prompting that seeded it? So what am I to do about this, except to label it what it appears to be - slop - and place higher value on something that I _know_ came from a human that I can relate to? To me, the internet is feeling increasingly lonely and homogenized because of this.
- chungusamongus 3mo ago>The part that I personally find difficult is that I can’t easily gauge the amount of human effort put in. The amount of effort is not relevant. If I spend all day trying the jump my car battery in 100 degree weather, only to find that the starter is the problem, all that effort was wasted. I should've just tested the battery. It is not inherently virtuous to work hard. Work smart, not hard.
- jazzpush2 3mo agoOf course the amount of effort is relevant - that's exactly what's being discussed. Your entire "Work smart, not hard." phrasing is exactly the issue: with AI, your 'smart' work causes 'hard' review from others. AI fundamentally imbalances the producer/consumer equation. (The caveats here are when trust is already established: I trust AI review from Carmack, not some random on HN.) If it takes you two prompts to create a 1 million line PR, and you expect me to review it, of course I'll be upset and feel like you don't value my time. I'm unsure why this is so hard to communicate.
- Kim_Bruning 3mo agoYou're not wrong some of the time. That said, did you manage to get through it, and can you explain what the argument was?
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThe model was trained on the code of the program that runs it, so it knows that program's bugs better than the humans who wrote the program. So it finds a tiny flaw and uses it to break out and copy itself in a place nobody will look...the point being you cant (safely) run a sophisticated model on software it has intimte knowledge of
- rightbyte 3mo agoAd hominem attacks are actually underrated. Like, why listen to bad people wanting you no good. It is a good shortcut. The failure is when it is used in bad faith. But that would apply to all techniques. LLMs are masters of bad faith discussions hiding misconceptions in optimal regression maths.
- chungusamongus 3mo ago[flagged]
- rightbyte 3mo agoAd hominem attacks attacks is often missused as a way to slander stating conflict of interests.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoThen just state the conflict of interest instead of resorting to insults. The problem with your way of thinking is, sometimes your opponent is detestable, but that doesn't make them wrong. Kneejerk dismissal of an argument on the basis of character can be self defeating. You do not want to reflexively dismiss a point that is potentially salient just because the person making it is potentially "bad."
- rightbyte 3mo agoSure from a philosophical standpoint I agree with you. But in practice you need to weight in trust. Bad faith retorics is just too expensive to engage. The main problem with ad hominem is when ot is used as "Mr Y agree with you. Mr Y is bad. You are wrong". Like, 2nd order ad hominem attacks?
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- 3mo ago
- thatjoeoverthr 3mo agoNot all arguments can be evaluated rigorously. Life is too short. They will be filtered on heuristics. No choice. This text was obviously randomly sampled from a popular, off the shelf model. You will have to accept that wise audiences will clock it at a glance, see that no person wrote it, and pass.
- chungusamongus 3mo agoIt says it was written by deepseek v4. You are making it sound like they're being deceptive. Life is too short yet you waste it complaining about things like this. I dont think you're wise. Youre provincial.
- thatjoeoverthr 3mo agoIt doesn’t matter which model it was sampled from. In any case, time isn’t fungible. I consider censuring it substantially more valuable use of time than reading it. And it’s definitely more pleasurable than reading the same verbal tics over and over again because some hustler can’t be bothered to edit their story before sending it out. If you expect to dump an unedited draft from a text sampler, you’re delusional. (Calling you delusional is also more pleasurable, and a more valuable use of time, than reading verbal tics.)
- chungusamongus 3mo agoBut You've spent so much more time complaining and rationalizing your biases than it would take to simply read the story.
- thatjoeoverthr 3mo agoCorrect. Ideal. The story deserves zero time. In this way, I am in agreement with its publisher.