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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

I think we can start dropping useless affectations like "it's important to note" now that ChatGPT has utterly co-opted them and revealed how meaningless they are. You could have simply stated that Anchor division is being dropped. I'm already reading your comment. You don't have to sell me on why you're noting it.

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Are you kidding ? You want us to bend our language usage for ChatGPT ?

Can you just let humans write without LLMs controlling the development of our language ?

We have managed to have language without your ChatGPT.

Personally I think it’s important to note the community standards here when replying to comments. It’s better to thoughtfully discuss something than to criticize the writing style of someone else in my opinion.

That style of comment does bother me though. It implies some kind of authority or consensus. "It is important to note" should just be read as "I (and people as enlightened/ informed as myself) think".

Just tell me your opinion, and I'll evaluate it based on it's content. You telling me that it's Important only puts me on alert for some kind of bias.

EDIT: to clarify, if I'm doing my job correctly as a critical reader, I can't trust a commenter to be speaking for anyone but themselves. Phrasing like "it's important to note" serves to divert from that, because it implies that it's not the commenter's opinion, they're just spreading the gospel.

Their assertion may be correct, but I'm doing it wrong if I take their word on it just because "it's important to note." Which is why I would prefer they leave it out, because I still need to do the work whether they tell me to or not, and telling me not to makes me suspicious.

I like the affectations. It shows other users that noting something of relevance is good user behavior. "Is your comment actually worth noting??" is a good consideration to keep HN high quality. Some users will misuse it but that's very transparent so I believe it's worth mentioning when you believe something is worth mentioning (haha)

perhaps it is affections which give language its character

it's worth noting that the simplification of language was ostensibly the goal of newspeak in the book, 1984

Lazy hack English professors teaching 1A and 1B gen eds to students by prescribing robotic formulas that include appositives and qualifiers like this, in my opinion completely deserve what they are getting when the same students are now feeding them robotically written essay assignments that follow these rules slavishly.

We can start dropping useless affectations like "I think" now that ChatGPT has utterly co-opted them and revealed how meaningless they are. You could have simply stated that reading hurts you. I'm already reading your comment, you don't need to tell me that you think the things you write.

If enough of us stop adding useless affections to our comments, ChatGPT will learn to do so too. Better comments = better bots!

Did you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... ?

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