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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

a subject that is close to my heart as I've been accused recently of being AI by someone who evidently didn't like what I wrote.

Admittedly it did make me chuckle that they thought AI sounds like a depressed character in science fiction, which was what I was writing. Poor AI.

I do use my share of em-dashes but hardly ever use the word delve, unless discussing something that Adam and Eve did, or if I were to write about Dwarves, Kobolds, Lovecraftian horrors and their worshipers because in those cases I would expect delving to occur.

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I also have faced this accusation. I believe it's indicative of younger people who haven't been exposed to older people who have pompous writing styles, like I unquestionably do. Like using idoneous words such as "unquestionably", or "idoneous"

Em dashes are just an affectation.

Patrick O'Brien (aubrey/maturin) used "idoneous" which is how I learned it, and he was both pompous, and erudite. And plain when it suited him: he translated "papillon" as well as writing lit and biography.

in my case it was because the character being depressed seemed emotionally disaffected, and that was interpreted as machine like.

But for lots of people being unemotional is normal. I kind of get it, but I think this is putting the cart before the horse. I mean Hemingway.. all those short manly sentences..

This is unequivocally NOT a Turing test moment. Simply parroting forms of writing which leads some people to accuse other people of being machines does not mean the thinking component is present.

> Em dashes are just an affectation.

Isn’t all punctuation?

The distinction between an em dash, an en dash and a hyphen is quite distinct from the general use of punctuation. It's more akin to '' vs " and `' in some respects. I have some sense 《 and ¿ are at least functional in their native languages.

Now semicolons on the other hand, they’re an affectation.

Niklaus Wirth disagrees;

> I believe its indicative of younger people who haven't been exposed to older people who have pompous writing styles.

That, or reading comprehension has dropped below a point in the young where they can no longer recognize or perceive intelligence, and so conflate AI with intelligence much like what is described in the Allegory of the Cave.

Lots of people are calling intelligent well read people AI because the accusers worldview can't distinguish those that are intelligent from those that are AI, or as an imposition of cost the same as any invective. Its just a new form of gaslighting.

You can't possibly be that intelligent so you must be AI. /s

We live in a wide world, which they don't realize because they've been coddled, and often lied to, where the lie traversed more than a generation. Brittle people break.

I assure you I am not that intelligent. Erudite sentences from me are very much repetition of things seen. In that narrow sense, they may be closer to an llm than I like.

Intelligence is misunderstood by a majority of people.

People think intelligence is this static thing that you are born with innately, and they cling to this belief, often to explain those that are so much better as natural talent/intelligence. This is mistaken.

Intelligence is a combination of speed of association, mental framework, and experience/exposure to differing and disagreeing ideas.

Believe it or not, you are more intelligent today, than you were when you were at 15 years old. The things you picked up along the way towards doing things successfully made you more intelligent, and there are things that can make you less intelligent too. Trauma and psychological stress as an example.

There are thresholds where people can't become smarter because the speed of association is so slow or the interference so high, that it doesn't provide a connection of ideas. IQ of less than 83 is the cutoff the military uses.

The framework/mental model you use is quite important as well, because intelligent people aren't delusional. They are methodical, and test the structures they use, and are right more often than they are wrong by a significant margin.

People who have been tortured, had significant trauma, or people who were forced to learn by rote false things, and then forced to unlearn those things repeatedly, all have significantly slower speed of association, which is a precursor for comprehension.

There are physiological factors that impact these things as well. How healthy you are, whether you take supplements, exercise regularly...

People are protean by nature, able to overcome quite a lot of deficiencies; but often not everything, there are limits; and things that can damage you permanently in life, sometimes without you even realizing it. Those things are the most insidious.

I've mostly escaped it by speaking Australian English, which scatters text with little archaisms like "reckon" and prefers an en-dash with spaces around it over an em-dash.

>little archaisms like "reckon"

"Fortnight" is by far my favourite, at least when dealing with my American colleagues.

"I'm sorry that writing like this is so beyond your reach that you can't imagine anyone doing it without a program" is one of those retorts which, regretfully, only works well in my head.

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