[eightysixfour]

> Hesiod felt it. Plato theorized it. Polybius mechanized it. Sallust prosecuted it (while guilty). Ibn Khaldun put it on a timer. Five civilizations, twenty-one centuries, one diagnosis. The only thing missing was proof.

> For most of history, “too many assholes ruin everything” remained a vibe. A well-documented, five-civilization vibe, but a vibe. Then, in the twentieth century, it became math.

> Sallust, it turns out, was doing game theory in a toga. He just didn’t have the notation.

> That’s not my characterization — it’s the title of the paper. And the researchers defined the term with clinical precision

> That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.

^^ that one in particular is a VERY strong Claude-ism

> Now, the finding inside the finding

> The study is not a catalog of monsters [...] It’s a measurement [...] with polling-grade precision

> Political violence wasn’t rhetorical; it was a body count

There are a lot in here, I could keep going...

[ptmkenny]

The trend that bothers me the most is excessive use of the em dash accompanied by awkward use of semicolons.

> Cooperators who are scattered among cheaters get eaten alive — the lone honest man in a crooked ward is not noble, mathematically speaking; he’s lunch.

There's also the not-quite-right logical link between clauses (I see this a lot in Opus output):

> Parasites are a constant; every era grows them to maximum greed, because that’s what parasites do.

("era grows them" doesn't fit with "that's what parasites do." If the era grows them, the parasites aren't doing their own growth.)

[Cpoll]

Yeah, I've changed my evaluation. The lists didn't do it for me, because they don't follow the usual rule-of-three, but the "genetic marker ... travels" line seems egregious. And the "not X, but Y".

[eightysixfour]

More recent Claude models tend to do these new longer lists. I think they've trained it on more varied sentence structures to give it a less monotonous feeling when reading, which worked, but now it has this tendency to go for "punchy" in a way that becomes grating.

> A thing. Another thing. More thing. But this thing. Four things, one common thread through time.

[toddmorey]

Also: load-bearing!

[IIsi50MHz]

Every one of those is also an example of how people have written and spoken since before AI existed. But then, I don't 'Claude', so I'm not sensitised by exposure.

[eightysixfour]

Sure, LLMs learned them from somewhere, but when you use it a lot you see that it has very specific, very repetitive writing patterns. This article makes little effort to adapt the writing away from those patterns.

It is like a code smell, when you see it, it is obvious.