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Comment by ddq | Hacker News Reader

I was enjoying this article but when you got to the importance of character, asking ChatGPT to define it seemed - at least to me - a bit of a cop-out. Would have liked more personal perspective there.

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Increasingly, when I ask someone for their opinion, they just tell me they've put that question into ChatGPT and this is what it said.

Well, okay, but if I wanted to hear that I would have asked ChatGPT directly, no?

As a counterpoint, isn't it implied that the person has read what ChatGPT wrote and by forwarding it, agrees that it's a roughly similar phrasing of their feelings on the issue? One would hope so, anyway.

Indeed that's what I thought, but I think it's fair to say, "I don't want to read ChatGPT's answers."

More precisely, I did get lazy and think, "well, I don't know what he meant, exactly, but he'd probably pick out one or two of these points, at least. ChatGPT tends to include everything, including the kitchen sink."

Plus, to me, "I don't know" is also an answer - I use it to gauge how niche a topic might actually be. LLMs do that at all.

Why not cut out the middleman then?

People who "agree with what ChatGPT wrote" are redundant in a discussion if they're merely relaying it.

If you're an expert in X and I'm not, you can easily google "intro to X" and skim the first handful of pages and send me the best one. This is the same idea IMHO.

Telling me that ChatGPT's answer is not horribly wrong could be a very useful data point.

OK, I'll accept that, thanks.

I spent a lot of time on the rest of it. For this part, I didn't think I had anything particular to say about "character" that wouldn't take me days to compose, and might not be what Blakey meant by it anyway.

But yeah, this device has worn out its welcome.

Why is the top ranking comments in this thread not even about the original article?

This is so typical in the HN comments.

This is a comment thread about 1962 interview of Miles Davis, not Albert Cory...

Albert's comment wasn't about himself, but about an article he wrote that I found quite relevant to the Miles Davis article.

He compares Miles' onstage behavior when another musician is soloing with Art Blakey's very different approach.

It's worth reading them both, and I am glad they were both called to my attention.

To answer your question about why it's at the top of the comment thread, I'm sure you already know the answer: multiple people like myself found it interesting and upvoted it.

Complaining about that won't change anything.

> Why is the top ranking comments in this thread not even about the original article?

In short: Because it got the most upvotes.

Sounds trivial but there is a deeper point to it. "Top comment" isn't about who gave the most praise or the harshest crisicism or the best summary or the most controversial take on the topic. It's about what the collective HN hivemind found was moving the conversation forward in the most interesting way. That's what's getting upvoted. If that happens to have mentioned another article, well, so be it.

Because discussions thread in various directions. It's not a school exam.

Because I wrote about something Miles said in that interview.

This is still not about your writing and shouldn't be at the top of the comments.

And its definetely NOT about programming, OR leadership.

You don't get to decide what should be at the top of the comments.

>And its definetely NOT about programming, OR leadership

Never had to be. Perhaps you took the name "Hacker News" too literally?

It does seem a little lazy and jarring to quote from ChatGPT, but technically is much the same as if he had added a named quote directly: "Merriam-Webster dictionary defines character as.." or "Albert Camus once said that character is..."

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