Second paragraph starts with > No, it’s not about the [...] Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.
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Claude is a Contrarian
51–60 of 152 posts
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#52Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.
This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
>quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
I like this notion of being contrarian in what it means to be contrarian.
Was not lost on me...
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#54Where 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.
I have absolutely seen this, and love to read out it's quotes to my wife. Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:" and crap like that. Even if it's correct about that, if it were a human, I'd assume they were 1-upping me on purpose to make themselves look better.
Or it'll strawman your point in the most bad faith way possible and correct you by handing you back the words you meant...
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#55When 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…
It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.
Totally, so many people like to bring up a counter-argument and expect you to fully disarm it, but very few people will justify whether their argument is actually relevant or reasonable to the discussion at hand.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#56I have in claude.md and it has in it's memory that it is my thinking partner. I don't want any action until I explicitly tell it to do so. And I don't want fancy dialogs because the options disappear when you dismiss them... Just recently Claude wrote some bash and changed 3 files even though it was in Plan Mode! It's maddening sometimes. It wastes so many tokens with stuff I have explicitly told it not to do. Sometimes I'll even add to a prompt "remember we're just thinking this through".
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#57> Claude thinks Humans are stupid
I haven't noticed this when using Claude models in Cursor. My guess is coding task is structured, and each step has mature process, so its personality is less pronounced. I dont have experiences using Claude or Claude Code, because my email and phone numbers were banned from Anthropic following an incident where I mistakenly purchased 5 pro subscriptions fro my team for Claude Code, and later discovered that pro does not include CC, and I thus requested a refund, and then were banned shortly after.
But after reading this line, I certainly can connect back to the general impression. That is, among all the cursor models, the output of Claude certainly matches this sentiment of "Claude thinks Humans are stupid"
Looking from a regulation perspective:
1. Frontier labs certainly produces models that reflect their own hidden biases. That's analogous to https://www.imperial.ac.uk/equality/resources/unconscious-bi... commonly identified among human organizations in their dealing of other humans (hiring, product design etc.)
2. They themselves are not willing to admit or do anything about this.
3. It's therefore effective for regulation to cover this and design objective measurements to assess such things.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#58[deleted]
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#59Where 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.
Really? I still find it too sycophantic at times.
It's contrarian in a sycophantic way. It'll agree with your main point and then arbitarily find something to bike shed over
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#60The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
Right! I don't think "Don’t contradict sentences" by itself as a rule is going to work. Give it a few examples because I wouldn't necessarily have pegged "This is hot, not cold." as a "contradicting sentence."