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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2806 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Character development updates (mine):

Remember the Model? Yeah, that one.

Right before I left India again, she told me that the guy she'd been dicking around while getting dicked down by the first gentleman had finally dumped her. I offered condolences calibrated to approximately the level of sincerity the situation deserved, which is to say I made the appropriate noises and thought about dinner.

Then, about a while back, she called. I'd had a shite day at work (base rate in this placement: high), and my entire evening's accomplishment to that point had been stripping down to my knickers and lying in bed marinating in my own sweat. I picked up anyway.

I asked if she was calling about the latest jackass. She denied it. I told her she wasn't fooling anyone, and certainly not me, because there is exactly one genre of call she makes and this was it. She pretended to care about my day; I told her it was awful, and to get to the point.

She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said yes. She demanded photographic evidence, which I supplied with rather more glee than was strictly dignified. Her oh was a small and satisfying thing to hear, as was her independent confirmation that I was dating a looker. I added that the lady in question also had a great personality and a proper career, ostensibly in the interest of thoroughness, actually because I wanted to watch the last of the air go out. And it did. I could hear her deflating down the line, whatever residual fantasy she'd been keeping on life support about me eventually coming home to marry her escaping like air from a punctured balloon.

She then spent fifteen minutes briefing me on the ridiculous new motherfucker: verbally and physically abusive, likely sleeping with his new boss to get ahead. I observed that these revelations really had me doing some soul-searching about what, exactly, had ever made her think I was her type. This was a joke, but only mostly. If your exes keep selecting for men who treat them like furniture, and I'm in the sample, at some point the question asks itself. The answer is I barely knew her, and I was decent enough to her anyway.

And then I finally snapped. I had been unkind to her the last time she pushed me past breaking point, but I hadn't washed my hands of her. I had even apologized and tried to help. I was past that.

I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was not her dad. I was not her boyfriend. I was not her shrink. They were the appropriate gentlemen who deserved her as a headache. I had no further interest in her problems. I was exhausted, I was done with her bullshit, and her absolute lack of taste, sensibility and judgement was beyond my ability to fix. And that even if I could fix it, I wouldn't. She asked if she could call me later. I said I'd call her back.

Reader, I did not. I suspect she got the message. Whether the message survives contact with the next crisis is a separate empirical question, but it can ring a phone that doesn't answer.

I told the (real) lady about all of this, and was asked, not unreasonably, why I'd spent twenty minutes on the phone with an ex. Fair question. Better question than she knew. The honest answer is that these headaches historically ran an hour or two, and a mere twenty minutes represented me slamming the door in her face and then throwing the lock, which is what I said, and which had the advantage of being true. The less flattering answer is the one flagged above: I picked up. There was some part of me that still wanted to be the man whose approval she was calling to lose. That part got twenty minutes of airtime and then got fired. I also mentioned that a professional model had concluded she was out of her league. This mollifed her appropriately, and is also true.

More recently: my boss, who I can usually count on to be supportive, implied that I'd been slacking on getting assessments done while he was away on vacation. This could not have been further from the truth. I had been overloaded to hell and back, other junior colleagues were telling me they'd been breaking down and crying in the loo, and I had said as much in an email he hadn't read. He then accused me of an error I was mostly confident wasn't mine.

I left the room devastated and about one provocation short of detonating. A colleague on her way out saw my face, put two and twenty-seven together, and found us a room so I could vent. She ended up doing all of the crying while I did most of the comforting, which was not the planned division of labor. I was amused by how this was the second time I'd had to reassure someone breaking down in that room, the last person had been the Dutch doctor, and she had been trying to console me first too. Both are moving to a better place, this one's an intern heading out to Australia soon; I'm the actual trainee and this skill is what makes me good at my job.*

I do appreciate the effort, and I say that without sarcasm. Mostly it reminded me that my boss was the one woefully out of touch with reality.

Now. The old me would have been genuinely broken by something like this. Not because the accusation was true, but because he would have needed it to be false in someone else's eyes before he could believe it himself. The current me skipped that step and went on the warpath, which looks superficially similar (both involve collecting a great deal of other people's opinions of me) and is not the same thing at all. The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.

I canvassed my juniors for feedback forms, amassed a fat stack, and dumped it on my boss's desk. I investigated the alleged error and found that a new intern had made the fuck up in question and I'd had no involvement at all, then went back and told my boss so while protecting said junior, because I know what it's like being three days into doctoring, even if it was five years ago for me. I documented, in exacting detail and impeccable NHS-speak, how our meeting had gone, and sent it to him "for input and corrections." He had none to offer. If you have never received a scrupulously polite email that is also a loaded weapon, I recommend the experience from the sending end only.

He emailed the next day to tell me the feedback was uniformly positive. I knew that already, and knew he was understating how good it was, because my colleagues had offered to show me what they'd written. He asked for more, from the rest of the ward, senior clinicians and non-medical staff included. I did ask he asked. The ones I saw could glow in the dark. I then did my best pitbull impression, cornered a senior reg, and did a clinical case with him. It was more difficult than I had anticipated when opting for it, but I decided that if this didn't demonstrate my clinical acumen, nothing would. I had overprepared so hard the poor bastard ran out of questions to ask me.

When I left work today, I handed in another stack of forms. My boss, looking remarkably harassed and overworked (see how that feels?), admitted he hadn't read the last batch. I asked him to ensure he did before reporting up the chain. He sighed and said he would.

He has only himself to blame. He told me to jump; I didn't ask how high, I put a dent in the ceiling. I suspect he's wincing at how the thing he implied about me (which I documented) compares to what the people who actually work with me every day chose to put in writing. He's not a bad person, and I suspect he does feel bad about it. He later came by to say he'd told his colleagues to expect me and to make time for me. That is quite literally all I've ever asked for, and thanks to us being temporarily overstaffed, I'm making so much hay during the local sunshine that I'm crashing the market.

The only person who gets to call me lazy is me, because it's not true. I intend to keep this up until he throws up his hands and tells me I can stop, he's gotten the memo.

*One of the feedback forms noted that patients had approached this doctor and told them that just talking to me had made them feel better. I know this, but it's good that others see it too.

I skimmed this but have the following observations.

Am I understanding it right that two men, working in a hospital, were crying together in the bathroom because their boss had some tough words for them?

And after that, you aggressively went around to all your seniors for feedback and, requested formal performance feedback, looked over their shoulder with it, and demanded your boss review it all?

I suppose that’s one way to approach work/career goals. Not a very good one in my estimation. Yes, corporate/institutional work settings have this whole formal HR performance review framework. I suppose it can be helpful for progression, but the real reason we do this is to document low performers and ease separations. It’s rarely for the employees benefit. You will get much more mileage making your bosses’ life easier rather than harder.

But that’s all besides the point I’m trying to make. Is it normal for Scottish/British men to weep at work or get emotionally flustered when they’re having a bad day? Is it normal for them to passive aggressively confront their bosses about it? Is it normal for them to stir the pot with the other staff?

Maybe it is, but that wouldn’t be my guess. This all sounds extremely feminine. I’d love to know the demographics of this place you work. Are you trying to fit in? Or is this just how you operate?

I suppose I’m looking for a window into UK office culture. If it’s as pozzed as the UK police, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at any of this. But this sure doesn’t sound like UK that was once a great country - rather, it sounds like place headed straight for the third world.

  1. Everyone crying in this story is a woman. Which is unsurprising, because the overwhelming majority of doctors under 35 in this ward are women, and because I have conspicuously used "she" as a pronoun to describe them. Only time I've ever cried in this ward, in the loo, is from sheer relief, when I heard I passed an important exam despite giving it at a time my brain was riddled with holes from acute stress, a depressive relapse, and regular migraines. I did very well, which was only somewhat surprising.
  2. My boss did not just have "mean words", he implied I was lazy and hadn't gotten important assessments done prior to a performance review due in a week or so. I hadn't gotten them done, but only because the whole ward was catching fire from the strain. I had asked my seniors to make the time to assess me half a dozen times, and they simply couldn't do it. He was unwilling to accept this, but he had been on his own vacation, and hadn't even had the opportunity to talk to said colleagues of his to confirm this. He said exactly as much, which was honest, but he spends 90% of his time away from the ward and does not have a clue as to what's going on at the ground level.
  3. A requirement of being a doctor in the NHS, at pretty much every level, is canvassing formal written feedback from a diverse sample of coworkers on a regular basis. Junior, senior, anything in between. The nurses, non-medical staff, anyone who has interacted with me is also fair game. And no, why the fuck would I stand over their shoulder? I handed them the forms, went away, and collected them later en-masse. The only pressure involved was simply confirming, later, that they'd finished it. They then, voluntarily, told me what they'd put in writing. I do not have any meaningful leverage over people who are quite literally on their last day at work here. I have minimal leverage on the seniors who did theirs too. The only reason I got glowing feedback is because my colleagues are very fond of me. They've seen me work hard, including at periods where I've been popping painkillers like candy so I don't get laid out with severe pain. They've seen me make time and regularly stay back late just to reassure patients and their family. They've also seen me being more supportive than you can imagine, when the new baby doctors come in and start shaking in their scrubs.
  4. My boss had asked me to get these assessments done, as well as several others. He was not wrong in doing this, because I am required to do them for career progression. They are read by higher-ups in the training program as well as himself. He had been annoyed that I hadn't gotten them done earlier, and had not believed it when I said this hadn't been for a lack of trying.
  5. I get along well with my boss, most of the time. I have no interest in making his life harder for the sake of it, but he gets paid extra to be my named supervisor and this comes with additional workload. I've been inundating him with this stuff because he's asked for it, and also because it completely undermines any concerns he's raised about me. He's a good guy, but he can be clueless, and this time he was. He has also not done several important things I've repeatedly asked him to do, and which he is obliged to do. People are complicated.

But that’s all besides the point I’m trying to make. Is it normal for Scottish/British men to weep at work or get emotionally flustered when they’re having a bad day? Is it normal for them to passive aggressively confront their bosses about it? Is it normal for them to stir the pot with the other staff?

None of the above buddy, and in part because none of that happened. If you have the time to write all of that, you have the time to do more than skim. You just have no idea what the workload can be like, this isn't a profession you opt for in the hopes of excellent work-life balance, and this particular department is on the hellish end of the spectrum.

I work for a consulting company you would have heard of. Im no stranger to demanding hours. And I’ve had people management responsibilities for over 10 years.

Based on that experience, I suspect we’re only hearing one side of the story. I’ve had easy people on my team and I’ve also had difficult ones. The difficult ones are always genuinely shocked when they get a bad review. It’s amazing, almost universally they think they are doing a supremely good job and they think they work extremely hard. And sometimes they are right - in a very narrow slice of their responsibilities. But they are often well below expectations in most other areas.

All of this is to say that this pattern matches with a problematic employee. Maybe you’re great with patients. But if your institution is anything like mine, being good at the technical piece of work is only one part of the job. Agitating with the staff, using excuses, and making demands like that will often get a person tagged with being more trouble than they are worth. And all the positive performance review documents in the system will only delay the inevitable.

I’m just trying to give you some perspective and help you course correct. Sometimes you need to hear the truth and I’m guessing the other women in your group are not giving it to you.

So this is a bit tricky - I don't disagree with some gentle attempts at redirection for self_made, EVERYONE always has room to improve after all.

However as someone who has worked a bunch of "high level" jobs within and without healthcare....it's an evergreen mistake to model healthcare as anything like a functional business. In the majority of physician roles feedback exists only to get rid of someone or for toxic personalities to dump on trainees for example.

If you know a bit about academia that's a good model. Feedback almost always comes from unskilled managers, is often outright malicious, and is nearly impossible to deliver in a way that's not grossly anxiety provoking as people are often a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars into training with no recourse if someone decides to fuck them (that's a tad more US specific).

Trainees breaking down, crying, and even killing themselves happens with some regularity. Shit is fucked.

That doesn't mean self_made shouldn't try and get more insight into the way he presents on this board (or to his coworkers) but healthcare work is its own breed and incredibly challenging and devastating even when management is on point which it usually isn't since academic physicians are essentially also managers by default.

It's so bad that people often effectively get personality disorder from training (think for instance god complex surgeons) which is.....not ideal.

Well, you tried. It's hard to rescue a young man from his own arrogance, when he's first feeling the flowering of his agency and ability.

He'll either get humbled in a few more years and give what you said a second thought, or turn into one of those monsters in management who's "never wrong" and lashes out at people, destroying the institution from within.

Shit, we got on the topic of UK institutions in terminal decay once again!

Well, you tried. It's hard to rescue a young man from his own arrogance, when he's first feeling the flowering of his agency and ability.

This is a great point worth highlighting. I too went through this sophomore syndrome early on in my career. It’s natural for talented people. But if one doesn’t break out of it, they will crash out and find an early ceiling in their trajectory.

He'll either get humbled in a few more years and give what you said a second thought, or turn into one of those monsters in management who's "never wrong" and lashes out at people, destroying the institution from within.

I admire the confidence with which you present these as the only possible outcomes. I hope I do end up with that much epistemic humility.

No epistemic humility required. Those are literally the only two outcomes physically possible. You think you can never be humbled? You ever meet a person who refuses to ever have been humbled their entire life?

You're a clinician, what does a person who always thinks they are the greatest, and is always correct about everything, and reacts aggressively when their ego is challenged sound like?

You're a clinician, what does a person who always thinks they are the greatest, and is always correct about everything, and reacts aggressively when their ego is challenged sound like?

I know perfectly well what that person is. The problem is that I resent your implication that that's a fair description of me. You don't have to go digging very far to find examples of me admitting that I'm wrong about something, really. Here, I'll make it super easy for myself and kill two birds with one stone:

@Brainwavez @sarker

The recent shakeup at Google, with the departure of Jeff Dean, puts them out of the running as a frontier lab. I'm not saying they don't have a hope at all, I'm saying that regaining the lead is going to be even more of an uphill struggle. In other words, I was wrong.

Now, back to you, Coil:

Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no answers only, please. I'm too old for these games.

I would if she stopped deserving it.

/sarcasm

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Hahahaha. I can't even be particularly mad, this loops right around into hilarious. When I worry I'm too self-aware for my own good, I can do with a reminder of what its absence looks like.

Aight buddy. I'm sure you've got a proper Big Boy job. I know a handful of Big 4 "consultants". Probably pays the bills well, doesn't it?

I do wonder just how common it would be for an error you've made while under stress to lead to someone dying. Do you have any idea what doctors do? Been to a hospital since you were (presumably) birthed in one?

My man, last time you skimmed this story you got the sex of every crying person in it wrong, then built a thesis about British civilizational decline on top of your own lacking literacy. Now you've skimmed again and built a theory of my employment. I'm starting to see what passes for your workflow: read 30% of the text, hallucinate the blanks, invoice for the full engagement. I wish I could get away with that, I seem to have to work for the money.

In other words: knock it off.

I am sure you have perspective to share. I sample plenty, and I've heard more informed opinions from the floridly psychotic.

Based on that experience, I suspect we’re only hearing one side of the story.

It's a first-person anecdote on a forum; of course you are. I presume Deloitte or PWC pays you for such cutting edge insight.

The difference is that my side comes with documents, and yours comes with hot takes about a profession you've never worked in a country you probably don't live in.

With all due respect (guess how much), the last man who guessed at my workplace from his armchair was you, one comment ago, and every checkable claim you made was wrong.

Let me see if bullet points help:

  • I had repeatedly tried to obtain the assessments.
  • The ward had been severely overloaded.
  • My supervisor had been away and had not spoken to the people working alongside me.
  • He cited supposed clinical errors without specifics.
  • The one specific error he did cite was demonstrably committed by somebody else.
  • He told me to obtain broader formal feedback.
  • I did exactly that.
  • The feedback, including from people outside my immediate peer group, has so far been uniformly good.
  • He then actively facilitated me obtaining still more of it.

This is a strange way to “agitate with staff.” Apparently I have been so disruptive that nurses, pharmacists, ward administrators, junior doctors and senior doctors keep volunteering to say nice things about me when formally asked, and have said it before, without asking, and my boss's response to my campaign of terror has been to tell his colleagues to make time to assess me.

Perhaps the inevitable reckoning is merely taking the scenic route.

And to spell it out, my male peers, which includes the senior reg, and most of the consultants? They like me too.

The facts, as you understand and present them, are useful, however, they are also incomplete. I have two things for you to consider on the off chance you want to be helped and are just trying to save face here.

  1. Management doesn’t like people that are annoying, demanding, and go around to the other staff badmouthing the bosses. Management also likes and expects to have the final word on things. It’s very annoying when people are explicitly or implicitly telling their boss all the great things they’re doing and ignoring all of the not so great things. It’s transparent and often invites backlash. A stack of good performance reviews are great, but if you’re annoying, it’s not going to get you very far.

  2. You’ve represented yourself and 100% aggrieved and flawless. I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of behavior problems or challenges. You seem to think you’re well above your peer group because “everyone likes me and thinks I’m great. I know this is true because they told me so”. The fact is that unless you have a major problem with someone, you’re pretty much always going to validate a person and say they’re amazing when you are confronted for informal feedback. Particularly when a person is a loose cannon and potentially going to go off the rails at the slightest criticism. For formal feedback, well, I wouldn’t just take someone at their word about what they wrote without verifying it myself. It’s possible they’re being selective in what they tell you.

I find this all so interesting. It’s a great little encapsulation of the modern work environment, institutional decay, and personality issues. Your situation aside, it’s going to be interesting to see how things develop now that hospitals are run by a bunch of women in a sewing circle (in spirit, even if half those women are men). We’re very far removed from the stoic old man doctor with a cigarette or pipe. Maybe things will be fine?

I understand that your day job involves coming into a situation where you had no original stake, or direct involvement, and then assuming an advisory position despite a clearly superficial understanding of the facts of the matter. I ask that you keep it there, I'm not paying you.

On a factual basis: no, I haven't presented myself as perfectly flawless on any day of my life, even I'm convincing women to let me sleep with them. Good grief. I, like a real human being, have made actual errors. And like a responsible trainee doctor, I've disclosed that to my boss. They're not material here, because the one specific issue he raised wasn't my fault.

Have you ever considered the possibility, in theory, that someone might actually be liked and good at their job? Or is that an entirely foreign prospect for you?

Beyond that? I hope your advice finds someone who needs it. If you want the fuller picture, I can ask my boss to sign up on themotte.org. I'm sure he has the time. God knows where I find it.

I can't speak to the object-level here, but I'll caution for anyone on the state side of seeing-like-a-state that this is also the sort of diagnostic that shows up when the measure is wildly off-target.

I'm amused that two three different women who you are not in a current intimate relationship with get you in a 1:1 and dump a bunch of their emotional shit on you.

They must feel so safe talking to you.

Is that sarcasm? Doesn't matter if it is, because it's true. I find that it's very helpful in my like of work to appear and act like the kind of person who is open to handling emotional dumps, and then be the guy who takes care of it. I don't have to put on some kind of suit to make it happen, it's just how I've been my whole life.

It explains why patients, stressed colleagues, IRL/online friends, and random people at the pub find me to vent. It makes me a good psychiatrist.

No sarcasm! It makes sense. Just noticing women don't do that with me unless we're in bed together.

The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.

Too much Claude man.

At this point I think we've learned what posters you can safely ignore after seeing the post is over a certain length.

A quick sort of your profile by top shows me you have a lot to contribute. I would not notice you if you were gone, because I don't think I ever notice you while you're here.

  • -22

Please consult Pangram. I burned 16 credits checking, and it was not worth it, you can do it yourself and see if the accusation holds. It would be helpful if the people accusing me of using too much AI would be accurate about which part (if any) is actually LLM-written or rewritten.

  • -11

Maybe I should have expanded on that: when you use LLMs a lot you have to be careful about putting their own tics into your style. It's something I notice myself when I'm dashing off posts here. Much of the post is very evidently human writing, and then, in one or two paragraphs (I'm guessing the ones you kind of dashed off in between the more major events), you're dropping LLMisms that stand out.

Thanks. But I still want to note that what you chose to quote as an LLMism was human written. It is easy enough to identify entirely LLM written work. It is feasible to identify LLM-modified work. It is much harder to identify specific aphorisms, sentences or phrases. Even the makers of Pangram acknowledge this.

You think that's bad? I interviewed a candidate for a job about 2 months ago that spoke and acted like an LLM. It was like that's how he learned to socialize.

This younger generation is cooked.

What do you mean he acted like an LLM?

Probably the way he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation. Or the way he excessively narrated everything he did before he did it. Or the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake. Apparently that's called a "Sycophantic Opener" in the realm of LLM verbal tics.

I donno man, watch any comedy sketch where a comedian is doing an LLM impression. It was like that. I think KRAZAM has done a few here and there.

Astral Codex Ten's latest Bay Area House Party comedy article may be of interest.

Something clicks. “Tran, are you talking like an AI?”

“You’re absolutely right,” says Tran. “I was tired of being socially anxious and tripping over my own tongue. I started out by reading Dale Carnegie, but taking his advice made me sound like a bad salesman—and that underscores how much norms have changed since the 1930s. The pivot was realizing that we already know what the best-liked speaking style is. AI companies ask human raters to judge their models’ outputs in RHLF, and the highest-rated style survives as the well-known ‘voice’ of the AIs. That’s not an an accident—it’s a testament to people genuinely preferring it. The average member of the population thinks it sounds polished, thoughtful, and sophisticated. And here’s the part most people find striking—in only one month, I’ve gone from being a friendless wallflower to having dates almost every night. That’s something that human-style supremacists genuinely need to sit with.”

“Oh, thank goodness. I thought Cluely was back in business or something.”

“You’ve put your finger on the natural misconception that people have when first encountering this area,” said Tran. “But talking like an AI isn’t the domain of one company. It’s a vibrant treasure trove of neologisms available to anybody. Would you like to hear more about how copying AI tics helps me keep conversations going?”

“Uh, sure— Wait! No!” You break off and turn around as fast as you can.

@Corvos @TowardsPanna

We recently caught an interviewee typing our questions into an LLM and reading the responses back to us verbatim. She didn't even bother to change the pronouns to make it make sense.

What do you even say to someone like that... In fact I'm interested in hearing what you guys told her.

That's far worse than the behavior @WhiningCoil described (which might actually occur without imitating an LLM, for the reasons Corvos described).

More comments

Probably the way he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation.

Or the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake. Apparently that's called a "Sycophantic Opener"

Also commonly known as "middle management"

This is just a helpful young man, of the type that LLMs were originally designed to imitate. A little sycophantic perhaps but that’s entirely fair in an interview.

he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation

This is a technique I was taught as a child to make sure you’ve understood your instructions, and something I routinely do with both clients and superiors.

the way he excessively narrated everything he did before he did it

Because he’s being interviewed and good interview technique is to talk a lot so your interviewer knows why you’re doing what you’re doing and gets familiar with your thought process.

the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake

He’s being interviewed, the poor bastard. You have the power to say if he gets a job or not, what do you expect, a middle finger?

The Anttichrist says "the seams are load-bearing" and the audience nods in unison.

It would be helpful if the people accusing me of using too much AI would be accurate about which part (if any) is actually LLM-written or rewritten.

I believe I have been, and only got a half-hearted deflection wrt "taste" for my trouble; evidently pushback only makes your proverbial pen harder. Now I just silently sigh and scroll, if nothing else I have a lot of practice in eyeballing the general substance from walls of AI/-assisted slop writing. (Not sure if it's a perk to be proud of really, but I'd rather start preparing for the future early.)

I don't have anything new to say that I haven't already said in that thread. If you continue to disagree with my approach, then I am happy to accept your "silent sigh and scroll". It's the end of the world, I will use every tool at my disposal till it makes me obsolete.

I will concede that you did better than Bartender, because he is completely incorrect here. Kudos for that, genuinely.

  • -10

If you continue to disagree with my approach, then I am happy to accept your "silent sigh and scroll".

A flattering type of audience to strive for, surely.

It's the end of the world, I will use every tool at my disposal till it makes me obsolete.

Less charitably, my point is that contra your response to Bartender, you evidently don't see any objections as helpful; you are committed to not noticing the problem and dismissing nooticers, in whatever form - Bartender's clipped remark and my more detailed objection get the same dismissive response, in spirit if not in word count. Hence, it's hardly surprising that slop alerts from poasters continue until morale improves quality control returns.

A flattering type of audience to strive for, surely.

Not my target audience at all, unfortunately. They just form a substantial portion when you write on the open internet, without pay-walls. I do this, at present, for free. And that means I do not have a particularly strong reason to care.

Less charitably, my point is that contra your response to Bartender, you evidently don't see any objections as helpful; you are committed to not noticing the problem and dismissing nooticers, in whatever form - Bartender's clipped remark and my more detailed objection get the same dismissive response, in spirit if not in word count.

Completely factually incorrect. You want a citation?

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/5FyqfDLX2L

Please review that thread, which includes correspondence with Gwern.

I give as much heed to this feedback as I think it is due. Which is not nil, clearly, or I wouldn't bother to respond at all. I am merely pointing out that I am not open to not using LLMs simply because people ask me to. I have yet to take Prima's money, which would enforce a commitment to never touching them while on this platform. You are free to complain, I am just as free to say that I've read the complaint and don't intend to act on it. I would have been more likely to be polite if you had been polite, but let's have reasonable expectations here.

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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