by perching_aix | 2025-06-01 22:31:28+00:00
> I challenge you to go through the history of your own posts and count how often you salt your statements of opinion with the magic dust of "I believe".

Challenge semi-accepted [0]. Looking through my entire comment history here so far on this wonderful forum (628 comments), there seem to be 179 hits for the word "think" and 21 for the word "believe". If we're being nice and assume these are all in separate comments, that would mean up to ~32% of my comments feature these words, and then only some portion of these will actually pertain to me guarding my own opinions with them. Still, feeling pretty chuffed about it if I'm honest, I think I'm doing pretty good.

For good measure, I also checked against your comment history of 100 comments. 2 counts of "believe", 9 counts of "think". Being nice here only yields us up to 11%, and focusing on expressions of opinion would only bring this down further.

That said, I think this is pretty dumb. [1]

> I did. You are not living up to the standard you are demanding of others (and which rarely anybody around here satisfies anyway).

Please do show me the numbers you got and your methodology. (And not from the research you're going to do after reading this comment - although if it's done actually proper, I'm interested in that too.)

> Seems we are not getting anywhere.

If only you put as much effort into actually considering what I wrote as you did into stalking my comment history or coming up with new fallacies and manipulation tactics, I think we would have.

Seriously:

- not being able to put it into words how you don't think LLMs understand is perfectly normal. You could have embraced this, but instead we're on like level 4 of you doubling down.

- sharing your opinion continues to be perfectly okay. Asserting your opinion over others continues to be super not okay.

- I (or others) don't need to be free of the faults that I described in order for these things to be faults. It's normal to make mistakes. It'd also be normal to just own them, but here I am, exporting my own comment history using the HN API, because you just can't acknowledge having been wrong and not defending it, even though reading between the lines you do seem to agree with basically everything I said, and are just trying to give me a rhetorical checkmate at this point.

> Please refrain from personal attacks going forward, thank you.

Tried my best. For real; I rewrote this like 6 times.

[0] You continue to heavily engage in manipulative language and fallacies, so I feel 100% uncompelled to honor your "challenge request" proper. I explicitly brought up several other criteria, such as a sentence presenting as an opinion when read in good faith, not being utilized as an accepted shared characterization when used in other sentences, and not being referred to as arguments elsewhere. What you describe as "statements of opinion with the magic dust of "I believe"" seem to intentionally gloss over these criteria, in what I can best describe as just a plain old strawman. So naturally, the challenge was as woefully weakly accepted as I possibly could.

[1] Obviously these statistics are completely bogus, since maybe you just don't offer your opinions much. Considering your performance here so far, this is pretty hard for me to believe, but it is entirely possible and I don't care to manually pore over 100 of your comments, sorry. If they are anything like the ones in this subthread here so far, I've already had more than enough. And if I went through the trouble of automating it ironically involving an LLM, I'd be doing a whole proper job of it at that point anyways, which would go against [0].