Hacker News Reader

Comment by niam | Hacker News Reader

Arguing that "at least John is doing [clown thing] in the open" just dilutes whatever leverage John's supporters had against John on that thing.

I find myself unwanting to be on the side of people who willingly give up leverage.

View on HN

I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.

When I say cancer sucks I'm not ignoring that other things also suck. So when people start trying to put those words into the words of others, they effectively act like cancer fanboys, which is weird and all about them, with no part of originating or relating to the the people they question about stuff they supposedly "ignore".

You analogy makes no sense.

"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"

is absolutely not equivalent to:

"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".

> "I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"

Nobody said that they're ignoring anything, hence putting words into the mouth of others part, and claiming that criticism of A implies ignoring B.

All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com