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Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

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Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want an AI modeled after short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans, not copying the attitude of non-confrontational Californians that say “dude, that’s awesome!” a dozen times a day. And I mean that unironically.

The problem is, performing social interaction theatre is way more important than actually using logic to solve issues. Look at how many corporate jobs are 10% engineering and 90% kissing people's assess in order to maintain social cohesion and hierarchy. Sure, you say you want "short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans" but guess what - most people say some variation of that, but when they actually se…

That is a fair assessment, but on the other hand, yes men are not required to do things, despite people liking them. You can achieve great things even if your team is made of Germans.

My tongue-in-cheek comment wonders if having actors with a modicum of personality to be better than just being surrounded by over-enthusiastic bootlickers. In my experience, many projects would benefit from someone saying “no, that is silly.”

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#332
I want to take this opportunity to teach people a little trick from improv comedy. It's called "A to B to C." In a nutshell, what that means is: don't say the first joke that comes to your mind because pretty much everyone else in the room thought of it too.

Anyone commenting "you're absolutely right" in this thread gets the wall.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#333

This is such a useful feature. I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't…

ChatGPT opened with a "Nope" the other day. I'm so proud of it. https://chatgpt.com/share/6896258f-2cac-800c-b235-c433648bf4...

Wow, that's really great. Nice level of information and a solid response off the bat. Hopefully Claude catches up to this? In general I've liked Claude pro but this is cool in contrast for sure.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#334
post #266

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

LLMs cannot tell fact from fiction. What's commonly called hallucinations stems from it not being able to reason, the way that humans appear to be able to do, no matter that some models are called "reasoning" now. It's all the same principle: most likely token in a given position. Adding internal monologue appears to help because, by being forced to break it down (internally, or by spitballing towards the user when t…

You’re absolutely wrong! This is not how reasoning models work. Chain-of-thought did not produce reasoning models.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Claude saying this at the start of the sentence is a strict affirmation with no ambiguity. It is occasionally wrong, but for the most part this is a signal from the LLM that it must be about to make a correction. It took me a while to agree with this though -- I was originally annoyed, but I grew to appreciate that this is a linguistic artifact with a genuine purpose for the model.

The form of this post is beautiful. "I agree" followed by a completely unrelated reasoning.

They agreed that "this feature" is very useful and explained why.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#336
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a phenomena in motorcyling called "target fixation". If you are looking at something, you are more likely to steer towards it. So it's a bad idea to focus on things you don't want to hit. The best approach is to pick a target line and keep the target line in focus at all times. I had never realized that AIs tend to have this same problem, but I can see it now that it's been mentioned! I have in the…

Also in racing and parachuting. Look where you want to go. Nothing else exists.

Same with FPV quadcopter flying. Focus on the line you want to fly.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#337
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... cows do drink cow milk, that's why it exists.

You’re likely thinking of calves. Cows (though admittedly ambiguous! But usually adult female bovines) do not drink milk. It’s insidious isn’t it?

So, this joke works only for natives who know that calf is not cow.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#338

This is such a useful feature. I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't…

ChatGPT opened with a "Nope" the other day. I'm so proud of it. https://chatgpt.com/share/6896258f-2cac-800c-b235-c433648bf4...

Is that GPT5? Reddit users are freaking out about losing 4o and AFAICT it's because 5 doesn't stroke their ego as hard as 4o. I feel there are roughly two classes of heavy LLM users - one who use it like a tool, and the other like a therapist. The latter may be a bigger money maker for many LLM companies so I worry GPT5 will be seen as a mistake to them, despite being better for research/agent work.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That your firm purchased training that was clearly just some chancers doing whatever seems like an even worse approach than just giving out access to a service and telling everyone to give it a shot. Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?

To be fair this shit is so new and constantly changing that I don’t think anybody truly understands what is going on.

Right… so maybe we should all stop pretending to be authorities on it.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#340

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

> I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more

You're absolutely right!

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