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Comment by mlmonkey | Hacker News Reader

You probably meant "I'm taking this with a tiny pinch of salt". The amount of salt is directly proportional to how much of the claim you are willing to accept.

Edit: I stand corrected. According to Gemini:

Me: Does using more salt mean accepting more of that claim?

Gemini: No, it actually means the exact opposite. If you say you need to take a claim with a huge pile of salt (or a shovel of salt), it means you believe the claim is highly unbelievable and you need an immense amount of skepticism to accept it. How the Metaphor Scales

• A single grain of salt: "I am slightly skeptical, but it could be true."

• A pinch of salt: "I have a healthy amount of doubt about this."

• A grain of sand / A truckload of salt: "This sounds completely made up, and I barely believe a single word of it."

The salt represents your skepticism, not your belief. Therefore, the more unbelievable the claim, the more "salt" you need to swallow it.

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I don't think this is right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_grain_of_salt The "grain" isn't a single grain, it's an old English measure which is around 65mg, i.e. roughly how much there is in a pinch. I've also only ever heard people use larger amounts to mean more scepticism.

A person leans on the titanic intellect of a trillion dollar company's most fearsome LLM, only to be corrected by a random commenter with a link to Wikipedia.

We live in interesting times.

Well Gemini and Wikipedia produced the same conclusion.

Linguistic questions were one of the first knowledge categories I trusted LLMs to be able to answer well - quite literally being models of language. It would be pretty shocking for a ~frontier model to get something like that wrong in the last like 3 years at least.

I was referring to the LLM giving the wrong definition of grain (i.e. not an individual grain), which while not as popular as it once was, is still widely used for ammunition.

I don't know how Gemini is wrong so much more often than anything else. Its actually quite impressive.

And the LLM likely referenced Wikipedia

And yet still misunderstood how much a grain is.

It's not an old English measure, because Latin has "granum salis" (a grain of salt) in medical authors and Pliny. There's no indication that it was a measure; it was a cube or crystal of salt.

Interesting, although could those not be different things? The linked page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit) - shows that it absolutely was a foundational measure in England. I guess it's probably down to the etymology, which would tell you when and where the phrase came from, then you could tell whether it from the English or ancient meaning, although it's not especially relevant to the meaning. The linked article does call it an "English idiom", so you'd need to show a similar ancient idiom for that to be the source.

Hmm? I always thought it was how much you had to flavor the statement to swallow it.

My grandmother said it had to do with throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder to ward off evil spirits and lies.

You only do that after spilling salt accidentally, and it's to knock the devil off if he happens to be sitting there (which would be what made you spill the salt at all). This, for my English ancestors, was plain common sense, unlike the superstitious balderdash adhered to in benighted lands...

Your grandmother is not an etymologist

No, the implication is that something "tastes off" so you need to add a pinch (+) of salt to make it palatable. The more off it tastes, the more salt you need.

(+) Or a "grain" if you're from the US since American English sayings seem to all date from the middle ages, while the rest of the English speaking world tends to update ours over time. No shade meant, I've just always found that interesting.

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.