Claude is a Contrarian
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Claude is a Contrarian
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Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#2This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#3When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#4This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.
part of Claude’s capability is reliant on its verbosity to push its responses into new vector spaces. If you instruct it to be terse, its capability is potentially reduced
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#5When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and…
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Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#6Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#7It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".
It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".
Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#8I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#9This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.
part of Claude’s capability is reliant on its verbosity to push its responses into new vector spaces. If you instruct it to be terse, its capability is potentially reduced
excellent, i dont need it to think, i need it to execute.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#10No it's not! (I jest)