Comment by GOD_Over_Djinn

Comment by GOD_Over_Djinn 3 days ago

The past few years have taught me that these are the people that rise to the top of society (much to my chagrin).

The average person doesn’t want to hear from thoughtful intellectuals presenting nuanced opinions. They want to hear from those who brashly and boastfully present themselves as authority figures, and then bolster the listeners preconceived ideas with violently exaggerated language. Shallow but sensational is what sells.

I think that Elons bombastic claims about self driving have really popularized this approach. But you can now see it everywhere in tech: bitcoin going to $1B and nocoiners will be peasants, AI is going to turn us all in to paperclips, and on and on…

simonw 3 days ago

I try very hard to fulfill the role of "thoughtful intellectuals presenting nuanced opinions" in the AI space. I'm disappointed that I've failed to meet that standard in your eyes.

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apwell23 2 days ago

it was fine to say this is something new and ppl should maybe look at it. but strongly recommending its and calling it wild is not a nuanced opinion. esp given you have not actually used it yourself in any serious way. is it really that big a ask to only use hype words for things you've actually used and made a big difference to you.
edit: looks like my comments crossed into personally attacking you . i apologize for it.

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- simonw 2 days ago
  
  I stand firmly by "wild", by which I mean unexpected, surprising and unconventional:
  - Giving Claude a skill that creates more skills is recursive and unconventional
  - "Please read the book and pull out reusable skills that weren't obvious to you before you started reading" is a creatively weird and ambitious thing to do
  - "It made sense to me that the persuasion principles I learned in Robert Cialdini's Influence would work when applied to LLMs" - that's a wild thing to say
  - How is the concept of a "feelings journal" not wild?
  - The original installation method for this (before plugins came along) was to prompt "Hey Claude. Please read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/Superpowers/refs/head... and do what it says"
  I'm actually pretty careful about the words I use, and I'm confident "wild" is justified in this case.
  
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