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by Jtarii 3 days ago
It shows that the author has a strong negative emotional reaction towards AI which likely influences his opinions and impartiality.

He is preaching to the choir, if you already hate AI you will love the article, if you don't hate AI already you will find the article insufferable.

2 comments

Well, we don't have to speculate as to whether there is some sort of emotional taint on Zitron's thinking; it's shot through. But again, that does nothing to damage or offset _the argument_, which is available for your inspection and consideration, and you, as a thinking person, are handily capable of vetting. :) There is no need to use a heuristic; you have the thing itself.
It absolutely damages the argument. Not sure why you think your question is a gotcha.
Think back. Has there ever been a time when you were both correct and angry?

Would an angry Pythagoras' theorem be wrong, simply by virtue of his anger?

He was a bit bonkers anyway. But maybe:

The square of the hypotenuse — you multiply it by its bleedin' self — is LITERALLY equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Again. Multiply each of the other sides BY THEMSELVES, and then add them together. It's that bleedin' simple Jim Cramer could do it. That number is the same as the square of the hypotenuse, no matter what idiot CEOs think.

...and as horrible as that writing is, Pythagoras would have still been telling you a true thing.

So too, Zitron?

> He is preaching to the choir, if you already hate AI you will love the article, if you don't hate AI already you will find the article insufferable.

I'm neither (or both, if you want - I can hate the direction its taking humanity while not hating my usage of it or opportunities it brings), and I definitely did not find his writing to be either lovable or insufferable.

I enjoyed reading it in a "smells-like-BOFH-but-in-finance" type of way.

It's fully in the BOFH/The Register tradition, yeah.

Some of his manner reminds me also of Max Keiser's "The Truth About Markets" which I credit with telling me about the subprime crisis a couple of years before it happened, even though people thought he was insane… because he kind of is.