Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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I'm not so sure about their utility as a tool for critical thinking, though that might be just because I've spent most of my life training my brain to do that sort of reflection and argumentation for me. That's obviously not the norm, so I guess if people can find utility in anti-sycophantic roleplaying LLMs to achieve a mode of thought to which they're unaccustomed, then perhaps that might be good... But mainly:
Is exactly how I use it besides writing small scripts for me.
I think of LLMs like intuition rather than intelligence: they're incredibly stupid and wrong and incapable of reason, intention, or thought. But they're a vague and inaccurate amalgamation of all writing on the internet and that can be useful for doing remedial tasks or getting a rough direction to go in.
Prompting a subject can bring up associated keywords, paradigms, and frameworks niche to domain experts which can greatly accelerate my ability to know what to search for and how to think about the questions I have.
They're damn near useless at answering them though, of course... But it helps me orient.
Often you don't know what you don't know. So your reflection and argumentation has to be based on something. In order to achieve your goal you also have to do research in order for it to be sufficiently valuable.
LLMs are great for finding "what you don't know" fast.
This strengthens your ability to both reflect and research topics manually. Which should be the last stop.
I've used LLMs to have conversations about technical topics I'm not familiar with. I ask it how something works, it answers, and then I ask several follow-up questions to clarify various things I'm interested in.
I think it's good enough for that sort of use, but you need to ask follow-up questions about anything important.