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Claude is a Contrarian

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Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#21

Post by debo_ »

lolakutty wrote: post #16
futhey wrote: post #3

When 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…

>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.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#22

Post by jorl17 »

knollimar wrote: post #6

Where 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.

[dead]

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#23

Post by mcv »

knollimar wrote: post #6

Where 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.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#24

Post by te_chris »

beezlewax wrote: post #14
manmal wrote: post #11

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch. I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, wit…

Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.

Yes, definitely load bearing.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#25

Post by mikepurvis »

twentyfiveoh1 wrote: post #15

I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention. It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.

ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.

With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#26

Post by mcv »

chomp wrote: post #4
mcv wrote: post #2

This 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

It's fine if it talks a lot to itself, I just don't want to read two pages of text for every question.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#28

Post by LPisGood »

lolakutty wrote: post #16
futhey wrote: post #3

When 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…

>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...

The smarter thing to do would be to steelman the original position and not assume that the weakest of counterarguments — stated confidently and without much further analysis — sufficiently refute it.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#30

Post by tsunamifury »

futhey wrote: post #3

When 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.
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