The Reading Room

Bookworm

00:15

0

I am trying to find out about John H. Crabb? Crabb wrote a historical novel entitled In the Crescent's Dark Shadow in 1952.

identification-request

Peter Shor

@verbose Refugees by Macneice

Gangways – the handclasp of the land. The resurrected,

The brisk or resigned Lazaruses, who want

Another chance, go trooping ashore. But chances

Are dubious. Fate is stingy, recalcitrant.

Refugee Blues, by Auden:

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in:

But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

(Compare and contrast.)

CDR

01:04

I'm afraid to make the tag, considering that this site has pretty strict guidelines about tag-format and stuff; would a [mysterious-author] tag be useful? It seems to me that nothing else could fit on this recent question, and the question about Djuna could also maybe use it. If [mysterious-authors] is a poor fit, what else could the first question I linked be tagged with?

Bookworm

01:47

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Q: A childen's book with a rhyme about a badger's home

I remember a few details about three children's books I read in elementary school in the USA, presumably borrowed from the school library instead of the local library, because I remember them in connection with a school I attended in November 1961 to June 1962. And it is possible that maybe those...

identification-request

Bookworm

02:56

0

Q: A children's book with a Beast in a forest

I remember a few details about three children's books I read in elementary school in the USA, presumably borrowed from the school library instead of the local library, because I remember them in connection with a school I attended in November 1961 to June 1962. And it is possible that maybe those...

identification-request

verbose

05:50

@DLosc She had written at least two books in that genre before: They Came to Baghdad and Destination Unknown

@PeterShor Thank you. Both extraordinarily moving poems.

@Mithical On the one hand, fair point; on the other, quibble.

@Randal'Thor cute!

@Alex The point is that ChatGPT generated answers are hard to identify as bad because they are so plausible. Yes, ChatGPT is a tool, but it is not a valid, useful, or reliable tool for generating accurate facts or defensible analyses. It's a con artist, presenting complete drivel as impeccable argument.

2

Your defense of it basically boils down to "it's fine if someone doesn't want to do the work of coming up with an answer and just uses ChatGPT, because others (those who care about the site) should take on the responsibility of evaluating such answers."

Why should I waste my time doing the sort of investigative work Gareth did on the answer? Why should Gareth? You're asking us to take on asymmetric effort on the grounds that ChatGPT is "a tool." That's like saying "a hammer is a tool, and it's fine if someone takes a hammer to your house, because you're the one responsible for rebuilding your house with other tools."

Nah, I'd say, make it known that the use of the tool is destructive and we don't want people using it here.

I put in a lot of work into my answers for this site. It's demotivating for me to do all that work if my answers have to fight for space alongside machine generated bullshit.

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Rand al'Thor

08:39

@Bookworm Impossible to be a true love of HNQ.

@Alex That's one problem, plus meta votes often indicate simple agreement/disagreement. Main-site posts will often be upvoted for being well-researched, even if the voter hasn't actually gone to verify all the information in them. ChatGPT posts can seem well-researched even if they're totally false.

@PeterShor Oh, I remember this one. It was one of the poems included in my English Lit GCSE (or English Lang maybe).

@CDR Hmm. The obvious thing to tag that question with is simply [john-h-crabb], but that's not helpful for a new user who doesn't have enough rep to create the tag. [author-identification] exists as a synonym of [identification-request], but I'm not sure if that really fits here. I feel like a tag name of [mysterious-author] might give a wrong impression (author of mystery stories? might be misused on any ID question?) but I can't think of anything better ...

verbose

@Bookworm Crabbwise into the HNQ

@Randal'Thor author-biography? Though I don't see an issue with just leaving it john-h-crabbe

Bookworm

10:18

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Q: What makes the Sydney barber's remark rude?

In Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Ironbark", a city barber makes a supposedly rude remark to his country bumpkin customer: And as he soaped and rubbed it in he made a rude remark: "I s'pose the flats is pretty green up there in Ironbark." It's not clear to me what makes this rude. I can ima...

meaning poetry

Gareth Rees

10:35

@Alex The process that you seem to be imagining is: (i) language model output gets posted as an answer; (ii) diligent members of the site fact-check the language model output and point out mistakes in comments; (iii) the language model output gets down-voted.

I don't think this properly engages with the nature of language models. Posting language model output is easy but fact-checking it is difficult and time-consuming, so the fact-checkers will burn out. I strongly recommend having a go at it yourself, for example, try your skills on the monograph question.

CowperKettle

10:50

> Albeit nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is Kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
Spite of this modern fret for Liberty,
Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane
Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,

Wilde of the day

Tsundoku

14:22

> For you yourself, sir, should be old as I am
if, like a crab, you could go backward.

CowperKettle

14:52

Контракт / Contract (1985) HD [EN subtitles]

►

Soviet cartoon based on a sci-fi story by Robert Silverberg

verbose

19:12

(Sigh) The Bodleian wants me to give them £10 for looking at that Larkin/Pym letter. I’m a weakling and can barely lift ten pounds. How am I supposed to carry it all the way to Oxford?

Rand al'Thor

19:46

@verbose Odsbodikins, what an odd Bodleian. Quomodocunquising is not meet for an institution of academe, methinks.

Alex

22:12

@GarethRees I don’t know enough about monographs to evaluate the accuracy of the claims in the answer, but I would approach it like any other answer — it is not very useful because it doesn’t provide any sources or evidence for any of the things it claims. So I wouldn’t upvote it and I would possibly downvote it. However, it is useful in the sense that it provides specific ideas that (if I was interested on the topic) I could research further, with more ease than if I was starting from scratch.

If the site was getting overrun with ChatGPT posts, it might be a different story. But as it stands now, it seems that this is pretty rare, so I don’t think it warrants drastic action.

verbose

@Randal'Thor Ikr, it's like they wanna extract their pound of flesh

@Alex It does claim to provide sources and evidence. That is the problem.

verbose

22:42

not the monograph q specifically, I mean; ChatGPT will happily make up references, provide page numbers, etc.

verbose

23:29

@CowperKettle Personally I'm not that fond of my state's Republicans (Kevin McCarthy, for example) 🙃

@Alex I don't think updating our off-topic guidance to include ChatGPT generated questions/answers constitutes "drastic action"

Alex

23:56

@verbose I was talking about that specific post. Since it has no citations/evidence it is not very useful, even had it been written by an actual person. But where it does provide references, they can be checked, which is what I would generally do if a human posted something as well.

verbose

That's what I mean when I say it shifts the burden of proof from the answerer to the asker/reader. If I ask a question here and I get a plausible-seeming answer with references to volumes that I have no access to, then I have to put in a lot of work to verify that answer ... to the point that it would have been easier to answer the question myself in the first place.

I think that is against the spirit of Stack Exchange, where we should be able to trust that those who answer know what they're talking about.

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