[barrell]

I don’t get me wrong, I’m on Ed’s side and get where he’s coming from. I just think his arguments are normally taken to the extreme, making them less defensible, when he could make the same arguments from a more moderate stance and ultimately be more convincing.

His arguments, albeit valid, can often sound like reductos ad absurdums the way he presents them.

[Aerolfos]

Yeah, probably.

One of the worst things about LLM writing is how it makes big promises of what it can prove in some piece of writing, and then never really follows up on that, or has specifics that go all the way towards the original, grandiose statement.

And frankly, Zitron is guilty of that pattern of writing too, or of relying on some unstated "baseline" knowledge which is clear from his other writing but not in the specific piece.

So, basically yeah, agreeing about the ad absurdum thing.

(I will note, the tone, the swearing, etc. really doesn't matter nearly as much as these problems, and everyone instead obsessing about the swearing and personality is really boring)

[barrell]

Personally I only find his swearing and delivery annoying when he is not delivering his point well (ie reducto ad absurdum). I’d be welling to bet a good amount of the complaints about his swearing are really just from a poor delivery, and people don’t know why, so they latch onto his swearing.

His early stuff was just as degenerate and vulgar, but was much less of an issue for me.

[techblueberry]

Part of the problem is the like - sociomedia factor. Ed’s figured out how to break through the noise. I’m not surprised that Ed Zitron is the kind of counterpoint you get in the Musk-Trump attention economy / CEO’s that sound more like prophets than business executives world.