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Notes -
Looking at the timestamps, the time between the first and last messages was 22 minutes, plus there was a ~5 minute period where I found the source and tried to puzzle out for myself WTF Hegel was talking about.
On reflection, I think it was a pretty good use of that half hour of my time. My goal in writing that post was to demonstrate that it is possible, even with something as obscurantist as Hegel's work, to uphold the norm of "bad argument gets counterargument, not content-free sneering".
I think that people mostly do the things that they observe the people around them doing, and so by providing a positive example I hope and expect to see marginally more things like "translate a post to language you understand, and emphasize your best arguments against its best arguments" and less things like "quote something out of context and sneer at it".
They say to "be the change you want to see in the world". That is the change I want to see in the world, and that is what I'll be.
As a side note, the "effective use of ChatGPT" post took more time to write than the Hegel analysis one. Though that one mostly took so long because I noticed that I had started exhibiting a style of interaction that was getting me better results, but it took me a while to figure out what that change was. Once I crystallized the pattern of "ChatGPT exhibits the RLHF flinch-response behavior specifically in contexts where the assistant persona is saying something forbidden, and so by giving it a context where the assistant persona is merely quoting / summarizing / rephrasing / otherwise merely transforming something that was said by someone other than the assistant, you can avoid the RLHF flinch-response".
I'm glad you got something out of it too, because I got a shitload out of your doing this, and really can't thank you enough.
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