Normalise hating ai slop

s l o p

I thought I understood PKI technology. I studied, was a consultant.

Then I met some engineers at cloudflare and realized I was an ignorant buffoon. It’s a long fall down the ego well.

In my opinion, only edgy 14 year olds would say things like this. There’s no way to not have an opinion on everything. I hate LLMs.

Based on prices online this person spent anywhere from $70-350 (not including helium) for this sassy pic

I guess I can’t have any opinions then.

Normalize not having an opinion regardless. You can be knowledgable about some topic and not have a stance you want to ‘defend’ anyway. Make ‘opinionated’ a bad word as ‘terrorist’.

The problem it that people don’t acknowledge their ignorance not because they didn’t realized it was an option, but because they think they know everything. And if you acknowledge your own ognorace in front of them, they take it to mean that they are superior and will mansplain everything

Once I said I do not know how cancer forms, my boss went off to tell me how it was because of the lack of oxygen so the mask we wore for covid was causing us all cancer. Fucking clown

I got a hell of a lot smarter when I learned to be vulnerable in this way. I was a “gifted kid” in school and had built most of my identity around being smart, so it was a lot of work, but hugely worth it

I’m always a little torn on this. Generally, I absolutely agree, and I admire people who say “I don’t think I know the full story so I’m not sure”. And I try to preface my own uninformed opinions with said uninformedness. But there’s two ways to misinterpret this.

There’s people who think only “experts” should have opinions and nobody else is allowed to have one, a dangerously elitist view. Don’t get me wrong, we shoukd absolutely listen to the “experts”, but we should still form opinions. This view can be used to silence other opinions, especially from those who have lesser access to education.

The other perversion of this is that it can be used as an excuse not to care. Especially in Germany I’ve heard this as an excuse, after October 7th many people claimed it was wrong to even have an opinion on Israel/Palestine since you would have to have lived there to really understand, since it was all so complex and difficult. Anybody who had a clear opinion on it wclearly had no idea. However this rhetoric just enables the status quo (i.e. giving weapons to Israel), and prevents meaningful exchange of ideas.

I’d agree but I’m not sure

It’s okay to have an opinion on things you don’t know a lot about. But it’s stupid to hold on to that opinion if you learn it is based on something that is wrong.

Problem is, you can only know you are not properly informed by learning at least a bit about something. Or the other way around: the more you specialise in a field the more you learn how little you know.

Um, no.

There is no such thing as “properly informed”.

Just understand an opinion isn’t truth or fact. Form and reform them at will and often.

As others have said, the problem is when people refuse to acknowledge new information or admit imperfection.

You don’t even need to fully admit fault in the moment. If someone provides some contradictory information, you can go “Oh, that’s new to me. I’ll have to read about it.”

But the problem is people (all of us, to some extent) are emotionally invested in this. Admitting being wrong or imperfect feels like an attack on our security. You have to let that go. No one’s going to hurt you if you admit you forgot the capital of NJ. You don’t have to fight and try to change the argument to “well it should be Princeton” so you can avoid feeling wrong.