In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
I think the more common outcome you're not seeing, for the "other" group, is that they just go back to smaller ponds where they excelled in the first place, and often make strong contributions there.
Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.
Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.
this is a very good point, and a blind spot in my comment because IME people who left the small pond in the first place were dissatisfied and unfulfilled there.
it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.
personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.
In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.
This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.
Math can also be taught very young with compounding effect, but you’re very unlikely to be exposed to the coaching and expertise at a young age. Of course the few in the world who combine aptitude with exposure are the kind of people you will find at Harvard. If you’re not one of them you may be a decade behind.
I also had a math professor who believed in extreme differences within the research community. He said only a top advisor would actually be engaging with real research and be able to bring you with them.
> More likely, get stuck a postdoc.
I still can’t understand why the outcomes for math Phds are so bad. They have extremely general intelligence which is applicable to any jobs I’ve had. I think it’s some combination of being unable to sell, unable to explain what they do, and still having their aspirations defined by professors.
It's because it's considered settling for lesser to "sell out to industry."
Kinda reminds me of the old "amateur athlete" paradigm.
It's not that you can't get a good job with a math PhD, it's that you can't get a good job and the respect of your peers/community. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be thrilled to hire math PhDs, they just don't also offer a ton of opportunities to work on cutting edge (math) research and publish papers.
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
Congratulations on learning piano. I think everyone who is capable of learning an instrument should consider it.
Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.
I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.
Thanks a lot. It is really fun. But, I don't have adult company in my neighborhood.
If take "What if I don't became great with this" anxiety out of the equation, it feels just more fun and life seems a little more colorful being a beginner.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
It sounds like the commenter above is just less insecure about themselves and more excited for opportunities to discuss and learn than you and whoever you're describing here are.
No im saying dominance hierarchies are the natural order of things and it’s ingrained in biology.
Pretending that hierarchy doesn’t matter and that you don’t care where you are in that hierarchy is lying to yourself.
It’s like saying the janitor is equal in respect to the software engineer. We don’t like to admit but the janitor is less respected and looked down upon. I’m annoyed by people who pretend it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know if some people are just wired differently, but I can back up the feeling of not caring at all where I fall in a hierarchy or how much people respect or don’t respect me.
The things I find most thrilling always relate to being challenged. Finding someone better than me qualifies. Having ideas challenged or being proven wrong are the most positive experience I’ve had, especially being forced to change deeply held beliefs. I mention this because it’s one of those things that I always hear people say that everyone hates, but I’ve always felt the opposite, just from a pure chemical feeling perspective. I don’t think I could possibly be unique in that experience.
I don’t think they said anything about their serotonin. They just described their reaction to the situation. If we were able to ask lobsters about their self-experience we might learn something about them too.
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world
Yeah, but these are also about people who are not even starting off at a field. These are teenagers. It really stood out that they can think where they can make most impact in the world at such an young age.
What are you talking about? Our society harasses every teenager to think again and again and give definite answers to exactly that kind of question. It's completely normal and exactly like every other young person.
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.
I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.
The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
My classical guitar instructor was well acquainted with Segovia, and he himself, was a student of Julian Bream. However, my instructor was without a doubt one of the most angry people I think I have ever interacted with. He was somewhat better known for his arrangements and less so as a performer.
> "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good."
I never had to think about this because my instructor would often tell me this. XD
Experienced people see through b.s. and push back. Less experienced people are simply easier to exploit. And whether or not the current job market allows us proper perspective, a large part of our working population is exploited. That’s how capitalism works in practice.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
The thing Tom Brady is accused of (deflating footballs) is scientifically proven to be a result of the ideal gas law. The NFL admitted they had no idea that was a thing when they levied the accusations at him.
Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did
"we have concluded
that it is more probable than not that Jim McNally (the Officials Locker Room attendant for the
Patriots) and John Jastremski (an equipment assistant for the Patriots) participated in a deliberate
effort to release air from Patriots game balls after the balls were examined by the referee
...
Our consultants confirmed that a reduction in air pressure is a natural result of
footballs moving from a relatively warm environment such as a locker room to a colder
environment such as a playing field. According to our scientific consultants, however, the
reduction in pressure of the Patriots game balls cannot be explained completely by basic
scientific principles, such as the Ideal Gas Law, based on the circumstances and conditions likely
to have been present on the day of the AFC Championship Game. In addition, the average
pressure drop of the Patriots game balls exceeded the average pressure drop of the Colts balls ...
...
Based on the testing and analysis, however, Exponent concluded that, within the range of likely
game conditions and circumstances studied, they could identify no set of credible environmental
or physical factors that completely accounts for the Patriots halftime measurements or for the
additional loss in air pressure exhibited by the Patriots game balls, as compared to the loss in air
pressure exhibited by the Colts game balls. Dr. Marlow agreed with this conclusion. This
absence of a credible scientific explanation for the Patriots halftime measurements tends to
support a finding that human intervention may account for the additional loss of pressure
exhibited by the Patriots balls."
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
Capitalism is a system that allows people to make wealth based on trade. The winners in this game are the people at the top of the hierarchy. All these type A billionaires are the ultimate winners of the game. Zuck is a winner.
In communism the system says there are no winners. Everything needs to be fair.
There's plenty of exceptions. PR China just after Deng was a good exception, and so was the Soviet Union after Stalin.
But they were only exception in the lame technical sense that you didn't have a single 'guy at the top' in charge, but a sharing of power by eg something like the Politburo.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.
I'm like that and really I have lots of free time because of not playing any competitive games
Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I have trouble believing that highly competitive people enjoy winning against people who aren't trying to win.
Catan has a lot of luck, you'd expect to lose a lot of games.
That's what it is for me. If you don't try to win, you disrespect the game and your opponents. Throwing the game is nearly as bad as cheating in my book.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason.
In a competition to be 'ever above everything else',
tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern,
be it Musk or Putin.
If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you,
he'd take your place.
So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this.
And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.
Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.
Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.
>1) It's certainly not unheard of for theories have observational or experimental data appears that sends them back to the drawing board for reworking and do eventually get to a consistent state
Sure. But when the socially dominant theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “a temporary setback that calls for some reworking”, and when a heterodox theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “falling flat on its face”, as you can see in another reply below. That’s not a healthy dynamic.
> There's not some shadowy cabal of cosmologists doing everything in their power to keep the cult of dark matter alive.
No… but curiously, you will get your comment flagged and removed on HN for making such a claim!
>and when a heterodox theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “falling flat on its face”, as you can see in another reply below. That’s not a healthy dynamic.
Because none of them get even close to explaining as much as dark matter does. This isn't complicated or a radical shift in standards - it's just requiring something be as good as the existing answer to get serious discussion. Pointing out that dark matter isn't perfect isn't an argument for things that are significantly less perfect than dark matter. There are massive gaps between dark matter and alternative theories. Something that worked as well as dark matter did and only struggled with a similar number of outliers wouldn't be said to fall flat on its face - but nothing is even in the same ballpark as it.
The more that can be explaining by an existing theory, the higher the bar is for any alternative theory to displace it. This is just how science has always worked.
>No… but curiously, you will get your comment flagged and removed on HN for making such a claim!
Because conspiracy theories with no evidence or grounding in reality don't make for intellectually stimulating discussion, I imagine.
There are some specialized terms here that you're unlikely to encounter outside of an academic philosophy paper, but there's nothing complex about the meanings of any of the individual terms. Once you know what the words mean, it all makes sense.
>eliminativist
Eliminativist claims in philosophy are claims that deny the existence of some class of entities. You can be eliminativist about all sorts of things - numbers, objective morals, countries, tables and chairs, etc.
>qualia
First-person conscious experiences. Pain is a qualia. The way the color blue looks, as opposed to say the color red or green, is a qualia. The sensation of hot or cold is a qualia.
When someone stubs their toe and says "ow", you can infer that they're in pain based on their behavior and your knowledge of how pain works, but you can't actually feel or directly observe their pain. That's the "first-person" part.
>phenomenal consciousness
A synonym for "qualia", because some philosophers started to feel like the word "qualia" had too much historical baggage, so they needed to come up with a new term.
>introspective illusion
Exactly what it says on the tin. An illusion (meaning, an impression that something is real, when it is in fact not) generated by introspection.
So, putting it all together:
>illusionism
Illusionism about consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is not real. So, to give a specific example, an illusionist would be committed to the thesis that pain is not real. As a corollary, no one has ever felt pain before, because there is no such thing as pain. People have been under the illusion that they feel pain, but they actually don't.
> First-person conscious experiences. Pain is a qualia. The way the color blue looks, as opposed to say the color red or green, is a qualia. The sensation of hot or cold is a qualia.
When someone stubs their toe and says "ow", you can infer that they're in pain based on their behavior and your knowledge of how pain works, but you can't actually feel or directly observe their pain. That's the "first-person" part.
So cool! I’ve always felt there was something really interesting about the idea that someone might internalize the color blue as I see the color red. I know we can define the colors mathematically, but I never knew the term for that subjective interpretive difference—qualia.
And if two people agree a wall is blocking their path does that elevate the sensation of wall from a quale into a reality?
I know that some members of this community (the “we live in a simulation”-ists) would posit that one person sensing the presence of another is as fabricated as the color “red”!
The modus ponens of one side is the modus tollens of the other side.
Meaning that when one side in philosophy says: from A (their body of arguments) follows B, and A holds, thus B must hold. A&B, A => B is called modus ponens.
Then the other side will say: from A follows B, and B does clearly not hold, thus A does not (or cannot) hold. A&B, ~B => ~A is called modus tollens.
Just wanted to add this here because that's how in my experience the discussion of such topics close to one's self tend to unfold.
Every field has jargon and specialized terminology. Do you expect to be able to read any random physics or math paper outside your area of expertise and understand every word?
Take a look at the user's comment history. I'd argue the majority of them are generated, it really doesn't take much to recognize the patterns and tics those models commonly display (for now*), and it doesn't seem there was any attempt to make it appear otherwise, too. It may look coherent at first, but there's no deeper meaning or significance, it's noise.
Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?
Why not both? Crazy people can be smart. As for mystic delirium well that's our modern sensibilities talking. Hell there are people today who believe in Marian apparitions.
It is, and I'm curious what dang and HN's plan is wrt this issue going forward. On one hand, the "assume good faith" has been a core tenet of this community. At the same time, LLM-generated walls of text aren't good faith. And they're not going to get less common from here on out.
I'm also surprised by how many human replies these comments get, seemingly unaware what they're responding to, given that it's HN and how long it's been since the release of GPT-3, I thought a larger percentage of readers would notice.
Very obvious ChatGPT style and structure. Here's another one of his comments copy/pasted from ChatGPT. Many others have called him out on this. He is a pathological liar.
It's truly a rorschach test of sorts. I agree with you that there isn't enough information to say, but reading through the comment history of the commenter in question does not make it seem more likely that they are GPT. Reminds me of Fallout 4 with everyone suspicious of each other being synths.
On the contrary, the comment history makes it very clear.
Pages and pages of relatively short comments, not a single one written in a remotely LLM-reminiscent style. Then, within a very short period, multiple very long comments in exactly the default style that GPT writes in.
The chances of someone waking up some day and entirely changing their writing style might as well be zero, I've never seen it. It would be a gradual process if everyone.
I read HN every day and I think this is only the 2nd time I've come across clearly generated content. If suspicion is the issue, that should be much more frequent. On Reddit it's already more common, and I've already had multiple people admit to it when pointed out, asking "How did you know?".
It does help that I've spent the last 1.5 years building LLM-based products every day.
A few weeks ago I had a eureka moment to describe it: GPT writes just like a non-native speaker who has spent the last month at a cram school purely aimed at acing the writing part of the TOEFL/IELTS test to study abroad. There, they absolutely cram repeatable patterns, which are easy to remember, score well and can be used in a variety of situations. Those patterns are not even unnatural - at times, native speakers do indeed use them too.
The problem is dosage. GPT and cram school students use such patterns in the majority of their sentences. Fluent speakers/humans only use them once every while. The temperature is much higher! English is a huge language grammatically, super dynamic - there's a massive variety of sentence structures to choose from. But by default, LLMs just choose whichever one is the most likely given the dataset it has been trained on (and RLHF etc), that's the whole idea. In real life, everyone's dataset and feedback are different. My most likely grammar pattern is not yours. Yet with LLMs, by default, its always the same.
It also makes perfect sense in a different way; at this point in time LLMs are still largely developed to beat very simplistic benchmarks using their "default" output. And English language exams are super similar to those benchmarks; I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually already included. So the optimal strategy to do well at those without actually understanding what's going on, but pretending to do so, ends up being the same. Just in this case it's LLM's pretending instead of students.
I should probably write a blog post about this at some point. Some might be curious: Does this mean that it's not possible to make LLMs write in a natural way? No, it's already very possible, and it doesn't take too much effort to make it do so. I'm currently developing a pico-SaaS that does just that, inspired by seeing these comments on Reddit, and now HN. Don't worry, I absolutely won't be offering API access and will be limiting usage to ensure it's only usable for humans, so no contributing to robotic AI spam from me.
I'd give you concrete examples, but in the comment in question literally every single sentence is a good example. Literally after the second sentence, the deal is sealed.
There's other strong indicators besides the structure - phrasings, cadence, sentence lengths and just content in general, but you don't even really need those. If you don't see it, instead of looking at it as a paragraph, split them up and put each sentence on a newline. If you still don't see it, you could try searching for something like "English writing test essay template".
I remember that there were "leaks" out of OpenAI that they had an LLM detector which was 99.9% accurate but they didn't want to release it. No idea about the veracity, but I very much believe it, though it's 100% going to be limited to those using very basic prompts like "write me a comment/essay/post about ___". I'm pretty sure I could build one of these myself quite easily, but it'll be pointless very soon anyway, as LLM UIs improve and LLM platforms will start providing "natural" personas as the norm.
> I'd give you concrete examples, but in the comment in question literally every single sentence is a good example. Literally after the second sentence, the deal is sealed.
I dunno. I believe you see that in it, but to me it just reads like any other Internet comment. Nothing at all stands out about it, to me. Hence my surprise at the strong assertions by two separate commenters.
Genuinely fascinating! I'd show you the instances on Reddit of similar comments where people admitted it after I pointed it out, but unfortunately I don't really want to link my accounts.
You're also free to confirm in my HN history that in hundreds of comments (and tens of thousands read), this is the single one time I've pointed it out. I did do a cross-check of their profile to confirm it, just in case it was a false positive - don't want to accuse anyone if I'm not 100% sure, because it's indeed technically possible that someone simply has the exact same writing style as the default ChatGPT assistant.
Here's the entire comment, dissected to make the structure and patterns clearer.
> As a __, __.
> However, it's crucial that ___.
> While __, ___ is risky.
> ___ highlight the importance of __ in __.
> We need to ___ to __.
Any single one of these sentences on their own wouldn't be enough. It's the combination, the dosage that I mentioned.
If you're interested in hard data that explores this phenomenon (although outdated/an older version of GPT), here's an article [1]. In a year or so, if you do the same analysis on "However, it's crucial that", you'll discover the same trend as the article showed for "a complex and multifaceted concept". Maybe the author would be open to sharing the code, or rerunning the experiment.
I've used ChatGPT extensively and this stuff is extremely obvious after you have read literally thousands of ChatGPT responses. Immediately recognized it and called him out. Boilerplate AI template response. ChatGPT has a very distinctive way of answering questions.
