I noticed a long time ago, that the more people focus on trivialities like typos when arguing against someone online, the more compelling the original argument is. Basically, bikeshedding.
The most compelling evidence of the compelling nature of the original argument is when the most-upvoted reply is a joke or a meme. That's when you really know that those responding have nothing else to say. It's a white flag being run up, or the dog turning over and exposing its belly.
Some academic cultures have a tradition of formal debates. They are based on the premise that an educated person should be able to argue convincingly for or against any idea, regardless of whether they believe in it. A natural corollary is that you should not let convincing arguments convince you, as the merits of the argument have little to do with the merits of the idea itself.
LLMs have made the situation worse. People's ability to generate convincing arguments now greatly exceeds their ability to evaluate the value of ideas.
In many situations, people doing this, skillfully even, has had quite pernicious consequences.
The stochastic parrot of my reference is not a meme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
The term was introduced in a 2021 paper on AI ethics titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? " that was authored by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell.[a]
> The bots' output may be annoying to read but they're clearly onto something
Sure. Next-token prediction with huge source set and computation power. Nothing new there.
No one talks about why the proof works, but they will happily spend thousands of pages explaining how it works.