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 state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
>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.
I like this notion of being contrarian in what it means to be contrarian.
Was not lost on me...
"on the contrary, it was not lost on me..."
on the contrary, it was not lost on me...
>To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
If it is kneejerk contrarianism how is it smarter?
Because they spotted a contradiction in the original argument that the other person did not consider before making their argument?
It's like reading an entire article and pointing out a typo without engaging with any of the context. It's easy to find a single fault and point it out loudly, but if you don't even try to engage with the intent of the message, you aren't providing anything of substance.
I would not consider typo to be a contradiction.
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It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.
Totally, so many people like to bring up a counter-argument and expect you to fully disarm it, but very few people will justify whether their argument is actually relevant or reasonable to the discussion at hand.
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