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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. This feels like pointless navel-gazing and a strange new language policing, and not something I look forward to. It's tiring and it lacks curiosity (e.g. "what's behind the affinity for the words elevated from wherever it is they come from?").

Imho people should just respond to actual ideas instead of constantly engaging in the second-order critique of how the language may or may not have been created.

It strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of "gossip" to be constantly engaging in second-order commentary on words. Of course gossip has its place and purpose, but if we seem to only let our minds live at that level, we're not moving between all the required scales of thinking that are required of this moment imho <3

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The words have the very practical problem of not communicating anything of substance. I guess "we want regulatory capture" didn't have quite the same ring.

How do they not communicate clearly? A few weeks ago they stated that they would like to regulate the pace of frontier model development/releases, and they reminded us of that in this post.

You must be pretty new to (not just) online discussions if you consider language policing to be a new phenomenon :)

Personally I consider it equally valid for people to publicly express annoyance with somebody's choice of words and for everybody to completely ignore that annoyance.

It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal. At some point the people who wish to engage with the substance just nope out when they see a sea of banality, and that's all you're left with.

Either the complainers are whining about something that isn't there, you are failing to notice something that is there, or it's subjective. Only one out of those three options merits the confidence with which you're dismissing the people you disagree with.

But those people believe that sloppy wording is itself a strong signal that the speaker/writer is the one lacking in substance, and doesn't deserve the attention or trust of the listener.

That's not what my comment is about. The parent said you're free to ignore the complaints, and I pointed out that when the volume is high, that's hard to do.

We all know that clanker language is often ridiculously bad. Got it.

Maybe policing every word and sentence and lodging your complaint along with all the other similar complaints is the right move. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But meanwhile we're degrading the overall discourse on the topic at hand.

I'm not saying which is right, I'm saying there's a cost to constantly expressing one's annoyance on a well-worn subject. If you click a thread about X to read complaints about Y, we're doing great I guess.

The discourse is degrading rapidly on multiple fronts, don't ignore one in favor of the other.

> It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal.

LLMs in a nutshell

True :) I recognize I had a soapbox moment, but yeah, it's complicated

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