In this context, instead of using claude to write the joke and then posting it with a disclaimer, I’d love to move to a norm of just posting the prompt without bothering to send it to an LLM at all. Instead of the blue dot parody in italics, the post could just be “Claude please rewrite the pale blue dot story to be about looking at the map.” Same content, faster to read, arguably funnier!
I wrote about 1⁄3 of this myself fyi. (It was important to me to get it to a point where it was not just a weaksauce version of itself but where I felt like I at least might basically endorse it and find it poignant as a way of looking at things)
I’m putting in my reaction to your original comment as I remember it in case it provides useful data for you. Please do not search for subtext or take this as a request for any sort of response; I’m just giving data at the risk of oversharing because I wonder if my reaction is at all indicative of the people downvoting.
I thought about downvoting because your comment seemed mean-spirited. I think the copypasta format and possibly the flippant use of an LLM made me defensive. I mostly decided I was mistaken about it being mean spirited because I don’t think that you would post a mean comment on a post like this based on my limited-but-nonzero interaction with you. At that point, I either couldn’t see what mixing epistemology in with the pale blue dot speech added to the discussion, or it didn’t resonate with me, so I stopped thinking about it and left the comment alone.
Fwiw I mostly just thought it was funny in a way that was sort of neutral on “is this a reasonable frame or not?”. It was the first thing I thought of as soon as I read your post title.
(I think it’s both true that in an important sense everything we care about is in the Map, and also true in an important sense that it’s not, and in the ways it was true it felt like a kind of legitimately poignant rewrite that felt like it helped me appreciate your post, and insofar as it was false it seemed hilarious (non-meanspiritedly, just in a “it’s funny that so many lines from the original remain reasonable sentences when you reframe it as about epistemology”))
lol at the strong downvote and wondering if it is more objecting to the idea itself or more because Claude co-wrote it?
In this context, instead of using claude to write the joke and then posting it with a disclaimer, I’d love to move to a norm of just posting the prompt without bothering to send it to an LLM at all. Instead of the blue dot parody in italics, the post could just be “Claude please rewrite the pale blue dot story to be about looking at the map.” Same content, faster to read, arguably funnier!
I wrote about 1⁄3 of this myself fyi. (It was important to me to get it to a point where it was not just a weaksauce version of itself but where I felt like I at least might basically endorse it and find it poignant as a way of looking at things)
I’m putting in my reaction to your original comment as I remember it in case it provides useful data for you. Please do not search for subtext or take this as a request for any sort of response; I’m just giving data at the risk of oversharing because I wonder if my reaction is at all indicative of the people downvoting.
I thought about downvoting because your comment seemed mean-spirited. I think the copypasta format and possibly the flippant use of an LLM made me defensive. I mostly decided I was mistaken about it being mean spirited because I don’t think that you would post a mean comment on a post like this based on my limited-but-nonzero interaction with you. At that point, I either couldn’t see what mixing epistemology in with the pale blue dot speech added to the discussion, or it didn’t resonate with me, so I stopped thinking about it and left the comment alone.
Nod.
Fwiw I mostly just thought it was funny in a way that was sort of neutral on “is this a reasonable frame or not?”. It was the first thing I thought of as soon as I read your post title.
(I think it’s both true that in an important sense everything we care about is in the Map, and also true in an important sense that it’s not, and in the ways it was true it felt like a kind of legitimately poignant rewrite that felt like it helped me appreciate your post, and insofar as it was false it seemed hilarious (non-meanspiritedly, just in a “it’s funny that so many lines from the original remain reasonable sentences when you reframe it as about epistemology”))
Claude is plagiarising Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”.