I have the exact same feeling about him.

He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.

It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.

> It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.

Just gets you disliked by both sides, "certainty sells".

Some folks would prefer a confident wrong/simple answer over a "well it depends/is nuanced" answer.

I almost wonder if it's even possible now that so many of us get our information through algorithmic feeds.

I listened to one Zitron interview on YouTube and my home page was immediately crammed full of similarly foamy-mouthed AI critics. (As well as plenty more Zitron.) And it's suggested some people with un-nuanced pro-AI takes, too. But what the algorithm has never, not even once, given me is a sober voice that calls attention to the nuances.

>It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions

Humans are built for fighting and killing the rival tribe, not for pondering whether the other tribe might actually be correct. We are exceptional for even being able to overcome ourselves enough that the outcome of "fighting and killing" can be minimized in the large.

> And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.

I don't think that's true - over the years he's changed his mind from "LLMs are useless slop machines" to "LLMs can be useful when applied wisely".

For instance in "The AI Hater's Manifesto" he says:

> It just came to me — the problem that I have with most people using LLMs is the delineation between outsourcing work and outsourcing thought. Those using LLMs to write little scripts or BQL code on a Bloomberg Terminal are inoffensive. [...] A tool being used as a tool to do tool things — in many cases involving the LLM writing a little 30-line Python script! — is not a problem, though it’s also not a trillion-dollar industry that needed to steal everybody’s art and writing.

Similarly, in "The More You Buy, The More You Lose":

> Sidenote: The only truly useful use case I’ve found is on the Bloomberg Terminal’s ASKB feature, which takes natural language and turns it into BQL code to make requests of Bloomberg’s datasets. It’s genuinely useful!

You can perhaps say that he underestimates what the technology is capable of (or, conversely, that other people overestimate LLMs) - but that's a different kind of conversation.

right, and look at current American politics. One side tried to tailor normal, routine and rational POVs.

The other...

EDIT: I do find it amusing when I write these types of comment, then suddenly realize the irrational man childs of the far right nationalist republic ethnostatists think they're the rational ones.