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(2025) Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles s

• bcantrill 27d ago
  And in that piece, I think I explained why it's important to take it seriously even though (and in fact, because!) it's self-reported?
  • raincole 27d ago
    No, you explained why the selection bias doesn't matter, which I agree. The self-report data still is completely worthless in the first place though. People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential dates, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better. Self-reporting data for human behavior is just noise.
    • bcantrill 27d ago
      I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here). And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.