Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · Apr 28 Great piece by Kelsey Piper on the intellectual dishonesty of Ed Zitron www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-bigges...
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Great article, but she is still too charitable by not focusing on his frequent bungling of facts. Here is just one small example, examining Zitron's claims about a particular matter: threadreaderapp.com/thread/20343... ("I wish more people understood how ignorant, innumerate, and sloppy he is.")
Remember the people that said online retail was a fad? That’s who Ed sounds like. The problem for Edward Doomerhands is that his skeptic position is still based on the 2023 narrative.
Quote at end of article: "I don’t actually think we need less skepticism in AI world. These companies are, indeed, run by people who are not very trustworthy, who often contradict each other or oversell their products." We all know where the intellectual dishonesty really comes from, Casey.
Ed Zitron is a great example of what happens when you either have no editor, or no editing skills. I don't care what anyone's saying when it's 80,000 words of ranting every week. jeez. he undermines whatever value his arguments might have (or not) just by sounding crazy.
preach
Only commenting to make it easier to find later (yes I know about bookmarking, but than I can't leave snarky comments)... I mostly just want to watch the fight unfold between commenters. lol...
Literally half of ed's 20k word newsletter every week is math. Just a bunch of numbers that don't add up!! And y'all ignore them! If Ed is intellectually dishonest, that makes AI defenders Mathematically Dishonest.
What strikes me: the dishonesty roots in certainty. Being wrong threatens the whole enterprise, so every position hardens around the one thing it can't afford to lose.
If Trump can sue to force CBS to air an unedited interview of Kamala Harris, can we sue to force an edited version of an Ed Zitron post?
Seems like Piper doesn’t have the fortitude to actually read Zitron, since these conclusions they draw have no basis in Ed’s actual writing.
The "intellectual dishonesty" observed is merely the predictable output of a system incentivizing performance over accuracy.
I think a lot of the issue comes from the vast audience using chatbots for consumer use cases where it’s not very good versus coding and work use cases where it can oftentimes be quite good and useful
I honestly want Claude's opinion on this.
The harder problem isn’t whether GenAI is useful because it obviously is! Ask anyone who’s shipped with it or even just played with NotebookLM… the real problem is the discourse has bifurcated into either boosters or Zitron-style nihilists, squeezing out the middle where the real work happens.
Gotta be honest, as someone who has read Zitron, I don't really see how this engages with much of his arguments. He has consistently laid out clear numbers and figures in support of this argument and Piper very conveniently ignores most of that.