Comment by unsungNovelty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unsungNovelty | Hacker News Reader

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> despite having spent no time or effort in thinking it up yourself.

I mean, how can you say that he didn't think it himself? I thought this same thing and realised apparently I'm not the first. You have no idea how many of my blog posts ideas have come in HN first before I could publish. People can have the same thoughts. And have em all the time as well.

Psss.. See how @sm-silversight who commented on your post said the same thing I did? That's realtime example right there.

Coming back to the topic at hand. I agree with the OP. If you don't care to write it, why should anyone read it? AI has good usecases. But am not sure writing is one.

Writing is not just about the end result. It's also about the thought process. I learn about the topic more as I write. I correct my incorrect understandings as I write. When am pissed, my article has a different tone. Am rude, too direct. When am content/happy, different one. All of this is sterilised into something robotic where the author won't even remember what he/she wrote? What's the to like? For brownie points?

> how can you say that he didn't think it himself?

Because the same sentence has been repeated practically word-for-word ad nauseam all over social media for years. What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation? They are perfectly able to step in and claim that it was their original thought if they want to.

> What do you think is plausible - that they repeated something that is damn near omnipresent in the discourse, or that they never saw any of the many, many times it has come up and independently came up with the exact same formulation?

Both are fully possible.

We're talking about a simple sentence that sounds a lot like something a primary school teacher or parent of young children would say. "If you won't do/don't/haven't done X, why should I Y?" is very normal moral/ethical phrasing.

I suppose I heard someone say it before I spelled it out in that way, but I am pretty confident I would ultimately have used a sufficiently similar expression, because I have been on the receiving end of the problem.

And that is putting aside the communicative compression of aphorisms. People don't use shared aphorisms to avoid ever doing the thinking themselves; they use them to shorthand more complex arguments for a listener who has already heard them. They are shared macros for agreed concepts. (Using them correctly requires having done the thinking they package up at least once).

I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.

Do you think that they came up with it independently? If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.

“Just do it” is an incredibly common, generic phrase, but if a new shoe manufacturer chose it as their slogan, it isn’t plausible that they came up with it independently of Nike.

> I don’t care what’s possible, I asked what was plausible.

OK then. BOTH ARE PLAUSIBLE. Clear enough?

It's absolutely not up to me to decide whether they came up with it independently.

But then again, it isn't up to you, Jim.

> If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.

This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?

Again: aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used. People can use them without you having the right to demand proof they thought them up for themselves like some prep school debate bully picking on a younger child.

> > If you aren’t willing to say you believe this, you are just asking me to waste my time arguing with a phantom opinion nobody holds.

> This is the weirdest thing to put in a comment you could simply not have made. If your time is so valuable why are you here commenting on HN?

It’s basic intellectual honesty. If nobody believes that they came up with it independently, putting it forward as if it’s a real argument is just a form of trolling. If I don’t believe it, you don’t believe it, and even the person who posted it doesn’t claim it’s original, you’re just baiting me to respond to a position nobody holds.

Do you believe that they actually came up with it independently? If you do actually believe this, then a discussion is not a waste of time. But if you aren’t willing to claim that position, it’s pointless me arguing against it because it’s just you deliberately wasting my time on something you don’t believe.

> aphorisms have value regardless of how many times they are used.

This is a cornerstone of the point I was making. You’re literally supporting the point I was making.

Lordy.

Selecting between alternatives is also a very valuable skill. Also known as "taste".

You are a senior software architect, you "prompt" 10 junior architects to write a software architecture proposal and then pick one which you send the client.

Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?

There are plenty of industries where "taste" is a real job.

Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.

> Would you say it's worthless, because the senior architect didn't care to write it?

Lemme ask you a counter question, the senior architect writes the proposal and the junior writes it. Which one do you think client likes better?

Moreover, Your focus is on the end-result. Sure, in corporate environment, most people don't care about what they do as long as the end results checks some boxes. That wasn't the discussion here. The discussion is about writing and reading in general. Whether it's worth my time or not if you don't mean (forget mean, don't even remember) what you wrote.

Also, in your own example, the client don't care as well. As long the client's checks all the boxes his/her/their manager said should satisfy. Nobody really gives a damn about the quality.

Also, are you saying you'll be fine paying for Financial Times, WSJ and NYTimes KNOWING all they do is shove the story through an LLM? Neither will there be a soul, nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.

> Or you think that for some reason prompting a LLM and forwarding it's output after vetting is different than prompting a human and forwarding the output after vetting.

There is difference no? I forward the output to get good feedback and correction from someone BETTER. And there is a process involved in it which showcases the "TASTE" you mentioned from the person whom you are forwarding your output to be vetted and that person comes up to you with feedback. And guess what? You learn from the person's feedback. You don't go back again and again forever to learn the same thing. That's exactly what am trying to point out.

> Neither will there be a soul

Maybe I just want the news.

> nor will there be any material effect on people who reads it.

This is a ridiculous thing to say - "because the Weather app in my phone is 100% automated with no human "soul" in it, I will not take it into account into how should I dress today"

> the client don't care as well

This applies here too. If you didn't pay for author's output, are not a subscriber to their Substack, why should they bother to hand craft you a quality human written post?

> If you didn't bother to write it, I won't bother to read it

So the argument is that effort should be somehow matched. Ok, let's go with that. It's well know that writing something takes 10x more effort than reading it. So if we use the market argument, if it takes you 10 min to read a blog post, the author should spend 1 min writing it, because writing is 10x more intense, and this is only possible with a LLM. You might say "but there is one author, and 1000 readers". That gets us back to the paying argument.

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