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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I'm critical of making correct accusations. Baby powder never had a bezene problem which was being implied. Baby powder definitely had issues, but different issues. J&J as a company definitely plays fast and loose with product ingredients vs health safety, but when making accusations, accuracy is important.

You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder after scraping HN for training data because we played it loose with facts would you? In fact, we call LLM incorrectness as hallucinating, so would you be less upset if I said that the other person was hallucinating?

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> You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder

That would be annoying, but since everyone checks their outputs against trusted sources, it wouldn’t be a major issue.

oh wow, you just won the "makes me spit up my drink from such an obviously funny lie" of the day line

Sure. I basically agree that their comment was sloppy, I just think for example:

> If you're going to sling dirt, at least make it accurate.

Something that might fit your sentiment better could be:

> It is right to sling dirt, but it is important to make it accurate.

There’s a ton of pro-corporate propaganda out there, so the good guys should stick together too.

There's another reason too, and inaccurate accusations could become libel/slander for evilCorp to come back at you for making such inaccurate accusations.

Reinforcing the strength of a future corporate product by doing their fact checking for them has got to be one of the weakest reasons for correctness and precision I've ever come across.

Please use a better example for the virtues of being correct, there are heaps better reasons.

In my quick search, the domain names were not filling me with confidence on the reliability of the site. Since J&J released a statement acknowledging their malfeasance, might as well take it from the horse's mouth.

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