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Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

angadh.com

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#51

Feels like a vast intrusion of privacy to upload my entire private notes vault to the AIs but I guess we've just given up on privacy now.

theZuck declared privacy dead a long time ago. he wasn't wrong. privacy was dead long before all of those "dumb fucks" started posted all of their data personally onto the web. before theZuck's declaration, there was still an illusion of privacy because the people tracking everything you did stayed in the shadows. the people talking about them leaned closer to wacko conspiracy people. theZuck and his ilk just walked out of the shadows and convinced people to give them data willingly. that data is different than the tracking they continue to do and improve.

however, you can still be pretty private by just not playing their reindeer games and have the privacy you thought you had prior to social media

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is unrelated to sycophancy. "It's a stunning piece. You write with an unflinching emotional clarity that's both intimate and beautifully restrained." > They are not some new, surprising development. OpenAI sure seemed surprised. https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/

> "It's a stunning piece. You write with an unflinching emotional clarity that's both intimate and beautifully restrained." This is a hallucination, since there is no source to refer to. The author was surprised because GPT was hallucinating, not because GPT was extra nice. Sycophancy might be related, but it's not the point of the article. If GPT had said "wow, your post is trash", the author would have been equally…

"Oh, yes, I read your new novel, it's great!" is precisely what a sycophant would tell you when they forgot to read it.

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#54
post #2

Love the idea! It's hard to get an "unbiased" outside perspective, especially on more personal, inner thoughts. Will definitely try this out, thanks for sharing.

But this is a completely biased perspective! Look at this sycophantic crap: The most interesting pattern is that your core tensions haven’t resolved - they’ve become more sophisticated. You’re still working through fundamental questions about individual agency vs. systems, risk-taking vs. institutional engagement, and autonomy vs. collaboration. But your framework for thinking about these tensions has become richer a…

A better prompt could have been used—I literally was just getting started on this as a fun little thing to discuss with a friend that is travelling. It was not meant to show up here. facepalm moment

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the midst of editing the comment when you replied, sorry. I didn't see your reply before I edited mine.

OK, but you're still blaming the user for the tool's failings. Which even the makers of the tool agreed were failings.

That's a valid point! The AI community still has much to improve on.

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and the part in the parentheses explains why: both are digital footprints. Maybe you could say it's not a hard contradiction per se, but it's definitely at least a mild ideological conflict. Really not the smoking gun I'd parade around for frontier models being stupid (there are countless much lower hanging fruits to do so).

Social media derived dynamics != "thoughtful digital participation". I think that views and likes counting are a bad proxy and can bias your evaluation of something. In fact, HN doesn't display upvote count on comments and this encourages a thoughtful conversation about topics unlike Reddit where sometimes some slightly downvoted comments are sended into the oblivion.

Likes are very low bar to entry means of participation. Above that are these short form comments. But beyond that there are people responding to blog posts with other long blog posts as well discussing various things. Each level drops the number of participants but increases the potential value. When we consider that Google used to use an algorithm of how often pages were linked this is another mechanism for what likes do, its slower but its more thoughtful and the internet is all of these things at once.

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#57
post #49
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that this is still making the rounds. When I read this it was immediately obvious that the author was using a non-web enabled AI which was just hallucinating; there were none of the inline indications that GPT was using the web. Additionally, it must be an old model; even the cheapest, lowest powered models on chatgpt.com today search the web when I ask them questions about articles as the autho…

We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response. The take away from this article should be that you are vastly overestimating how people understand and interact with technology. The author's exper…

> We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response.

The exact opposite is true. I'd word it as

"We're nerds, we don't understand nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people are not nerds

> ChatGPT says "I read your article" they trust it, they do not think, "ah well this model doesn't support browsing the web so ChatGPT must be hallucinating". That's technobabble.

No, that's humans. Happens literally every day at every workplace I've ever been in

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#58

> You seem to be trying to integrate Eastern philosophy’s emphasis on acceptance with Western ideals of active engagement and personal agency. Where is the contradiction here? Westerners too often think of acceptance and compassion as this soft deference in the face of adversity. It's not! Sometimes compassion is wrathful, as we're talking about waking someone up to the true nature of what a situation is. As long as…

[flagged]

Oh for sure, I wouldn't blame anyone for being misguided by these symbols, and generally these wrathful practices aren't even taught until a practitioner has had quite a lot of experience in their meditation practice. It's far too easy to think "oh, well I'm a compassionate being just like Mahakala, therefore I should be able to hit my child because I know what's best for them". That's of course not what is being depicted here. What is being depicted is transforming the five afflictive emotions [1] into their positive wisdoms [2].

And we should also put these symbols into the context of a Buddhist worldview -- that a human life is not guaranteed, and even if we get one and survive into adulthood, most will go about their regular lives without using this opportunity to do the deep work necessary to escape our self-inflicted cycle of suffering. The wrathful symbol is startling by design, to say "hey! wake up and do something about your life, it'll end soon".

So that's all to say, we should focus on the metaphors that they embody rather than their literal depictions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleshas_(Buddhism)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Tath%C4%81gatas

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#59
post #3

started reading but got hung up on what an "Obsidian Vault" was. i assumed that it was some sort of abstract though-experiment thing like Searle's "Chinese room", but it turns out that its an actual folder filled with notes.

Hahaha I love that idea. An LLM enters the Obsidian vault and responds to a prompt by following an arcane and elaborate sequence of calculations. Does it really understand?

... the boy-wizard Claude Prompter battled hoards of P-zombies as he descended further into the Obsidian Vault to face his ultimate foe -- Roko's Basilisk.

Re: Claude finds contradictions in my thinking

#60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is a completely biased perspective! Look at this sycophantic crap: The most interesting pattern is that your core tensions haven’t resolved - they’ve become more sophisticated. You’re still working through fundamental questions about individual agency vs. systems, risk-taking vs. institutional engagement, and autonomy vs. collaboration. But your framework for thinking about these tensions has become richer a…

A better prompt could have been used—I literally was just getting started on this as a fun little thing to discuss with a friend that is travelling. It was not meant to show up here. facepalm moment

Maybe it would be better to prompt topic-by-topic. I think as it stands Claude is essentially hitting you with the Barnum effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect (I think a lot of laypeople use LLMs as a modern replacement for tarot or astrology.)
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