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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31530 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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One of my heuristics for good persuasive writing involves the number of citations, or at least clear distinct factual references that could be verified, as the clerk is doing for the rest of us here. Broad, general arguments are easy to write, but in my opinion shouldn't be weighted as heavily.

The amusing part here is that I have been doing this for years to weed out political hacks, long predating GPT.

Sources went out of style mid COVID when everyone realized there was a source for anything

Yep sources are only as valuable as there exist institutions worthy of trust... the second institutions cease to be trustworthy a citation to them is the equivalent of "I heard it from a friend of a friend of mine" wasted space betraying ignorance when you could just be arguing and establishing your own authority

Conjuring up a bunch of sources for literally anything was trivial before LLMs and now it's easier than ever and shouldn't be weighed heavily either.

I'd even go so far as to say that having having more citations than absolutely necessary is a signal of bad faith, as they work as a form Gish gallop etc.

I agree with this, and I regularly lambast my students for saying things like -

As has been widely demonstrated, AI is a tool of the patriarchy (Anderson, 2018; Balaji, 2021; Cernowitz, 2023).

As I emphasise, using citations like this demonstrates nothing. This kind of "drive-by citation" is only barely acceptable in one context, namely where there is a very clearly operationalised and relatively tractable empirical claim being made, e.g.,

Studies of American graduate students demonstrate a clear positive correlation between GPA and SAT scores (Desai, 2018; Estefez, 2020; Firenzi, 2022).

Even then, it's generally better to spend at least a little time discussing methodology.

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