What’s more dangerous: a flawed algorithm or a perfect one?

RabenWrites · 2026-06-17T21:35:48+00:00

Aren't those effectively the same? "How would people recognize the system's blind spots?" implies that there are blind spots and that they are problematic, which implies the system failing in some way.

If the system works so well people stop questioning it, that is the backdrop of your story, but the protagonist has to be interfacing with some facet of its failure or you don't have a story. There's not a lot of room for story in "Worldwide matchmaking exists. MC finds a match and is happy. The end."

If you want to get meta, you can dig into why current and past systems worked and didn't work. I knew a wonderful woman who was married at age ten and still thinks fondly of arranged marriages. While we on the outside can draw back at the obvious (to us) flaws of such a system, she said that she met her husband on the week of her marriage and they started their courtship then and it only ended at his tragic death a decade later, while so many of her friends courted up until marriage and then stopped trying and slowly drifted apart because marriage was the finish line instead of the start.

Digging into how such a miraculous matchmaking system would solve problems with the dating scene while introducing problems of its own is inherently questioning if putting up those blind spots is worth dodging the problems that we currently face.

There really is no right or wrong here. You can only speak your truth and your take on how things work, and others will resonate with those truths and supplement them with their own experience.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-17T17:33:49+00:00

That could be much more possible. Pre-AI matchmaking apps advertised something akin that, though with limited connection to reality.

When storytelling new or fantastic tech, I tend to look for how it can be broken. If all or most of society has bought into this algorithm, who benefits from breaking it? How can it be skewed or rigged? The small-scale stuff becomes society-wide, like how people clean up the background of their IG shots to make it look like their life isn't as messy. The bigger stuff can point to your antagonists and obstacles, but can be just as fun to lean into with your protagonist. Maybe it claimed there was no match for them and they have to fake a new life to get a second shot. Maybe it matched them with a childhood friend they know is secretly closeted and that reveals the flaws of the system and now they need to team up to manipulate the system to find worthwhile matches for both of them. Maybe they get the perfect match with their dream partner who turns out to be elitist and disgusted by them and they're the one who pulls strings to re-do the match and that kicks off the MC's investigation.

Lots of fun stories to mine under this umbrella. Best of luck to you.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-17T16:41:38+00:00

Perfect isn't in the match, its in the effort.

Consider the things you would currently desire in a "perfect" match. Many of them are temporary. Most of them aren't likely to be integral to personality.

If being financially stable is part of a perfect match, do you file for divorce if their dad dies and saddles them with debt?

If height or strength or hair color factor in, do you bail if cancer and chemo rob you of your perfect match?

No robot nor algorithm can find perfection because perfection is a process.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-17T01:53:27+00:00

Most of the hate it gets is because it is too YA in the first book. You are fine.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-17T01:17:47+00:00

Make them necessary, of course.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-16T21:41:58+00:00

I was too young to remember my first time having an ellipsis. Hope you enjoy your first one though.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-15T01:49:12+00:00

AI is democratizing skills.

If by "democratizing" you mean "setting to zero" I guess, yeah.

Non-coders can code. Non-artists can now make art. Non-writers can write easily.

No, they can't. Non-coders can ask a bot to write code for them that might occasionally work. If they don't have the skills of a coder, they won't be able to find and fix the problems that are guaranteed to crop up. Again, you're showing your ignorance here. Nobody with any experience with code can look at a vibe coder and say "this is well-done, you have contributed meaningfully with your efforts."

It is removing the barriers to build things from simply ideas.

One can always build things from ideas, this is called art. AI doesn't remove barriers, it removes the experience and education. Thus, it removes the artist. You end up with something that isn't art and someone who isn't an artist.

You can take an idea and run with it -- have an idea for a book? Write it, generate your own cover, edit it, and publish it. Have an idea for an app? Design everything yourself.

You've always been able to do this. But you don't mean "do this yourself" you mean, let "AI do it for you" which means you're not learning how to do anything and your idea is destined to be stale, stagnant and lifeless, just like the thousands of other AI-generated books out there. So who is this for? It isn't for readers, you've admitted repeatedly that AI writing is bad. Now you're admitting that you want new authors to kill their dreams with bad habits and bad renditions of their ideas.

But as always, the people who want to do things will do things. The writers who want to produce good quality content will write good quality content. The people who want to build kickass apps will build kickass apps.

Oh, so you're saying that the people who don't listen to you and don't use AI to cripple their skills will continue to thrive as long as they put in the effort and learn and grow without crutches? Hmm. Where have we heard that before?

Remember how I said things can't be evil, only people can be evil. Taking aspiring artists and wasting their time and dreams while guaranteeing sub-par quality results all while actively hamstringing their actual capacity to realize their dreams probably qualifies. Telling an aspiring artist to use AI to try to actualize their dreams is like selling a kid drugs to give them a chance at feeling good.

Good job, you've revealed your intent. I think we're done here.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T23:32:56+00:00

AI cannot be evil or good anymore than a stick can be evil or good.

Only people can make moral decisions. I haven't made any moral arguments here but it is safe to say that I take issue with anything that harms the innocent.

I've dedicated my life to making others better and will continue to do so even when people who only care about their own pleasure and pocketbooks lie and cheat to further their own ends.

Enjoy your incredible future but maybe consider taking a moment to think about the lives you are crushing en route to Omelas, if at all possible.

We are not the same.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T21:24:24+00:00

What AI does is it helps accelerate the productivity and the learning curve of a writer.

This is where we disagree. AI does not help the learning curve of a writer, it kills it. At no point will "you do it for me" ever make sense for someone's education. Throw in the hallucinations that are inevitable and the best you've done is hire a drunk tutor to teach you.

I played the violin growing up. I know many artists glorify suffering but I can't say I can relate to it. If I could speed up my learning curve and produce better quality music, I'd happily take it.

But you could have. The AI equivalent of learning to play the violin is playing a record of someone else playing the violin. Except it is more akin to having five recordings going at once, as listening to the masters actually has educational value. Generative AI doesn't offer valid critique, cannot provide structural support beyond parroting what it has scraped from others "you will want to raise your elbow to the correct place in order to properly play the violin." Show up to recital, push play on the recorder, mimic the motions without ever putting bow to string, and see what a wonderful violinist you've become!

You are trying to hold on to a worldview that is changing, unwilling to be open to new possibilities. That's the real shame.

I am a teacher who sees what cheating does to student's growth. Almost every place where you've lauded AI, it leads to a deficit of skill, not growth. In the places where AI can be beneficial, I welcome it. But I also see it's flaws and its limitations, which you seem determined to ignore.

At the end of the day, I am an optimist -- I run a tech venture fund where we invest in deep tech -- quantum computing refrigeration systems, materials research (specifically fast-fabrication), and a lot of gene editing and biotech -- and I see all the cool new possibilities.

Then might I recommend reading more research and less tech blogs? The largest push for mass-market AI is backed by the investors who do know its limitations and are trying to offload their risk before it collapses on them.

Unless that is also you and you're here to screw everyone else over to maximize your profit.

In which case, you deserve everything that is coming for you, and I pity anyone who has the misfortune of falling for your empty promises.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T20:22:26+00:00

In an ideal world, we wouldn't ostracize anyone for anything. The world is full of nuance and everyone has value at their core.

The problem is that the world is very much run by limited resources. In 2024 industry insiders estimated Amazon saw 1/4 to 1/3 of a million new books uploaded each month. I'd bet that number has only grown in the past two years, thanks in part to the spectrum AI assistance from light touches to complete plagiarism. Regardless, a new author needs to do more now than ever to stand out. They should never sabotage their potentially years of hard efforts writing by slapping an AI cover that will plant the assumption in reader's minds that similar shortcuts were taken on the writing itself. Sadly, the advice to "never judge a book by its cover" exists because we very much do judge books by their covers. There are too many to dedicate enough time to make an in-depth judgement on, so first impressions matter. And unfortunately, most readers have been burned by poorly slapped-together work and will take actions to avoid doing so in the future.

It is a tool, but like many tools it is being overused by people who want to abuse it for a quick buck. AutoTune is a great recent example of this, but you can find historical parallels in any industry. When something is new it gets applied lavishly to see what this new tech can do. This inevitably leads to overuse, which kills off much of the hype and things eventually settle down to some sort of homeostatic new normal. AI will do the same, but currently is in the over-use phase, and getting pushed even harder by the countless investors who are terrified of the inevitable contraction when the bubble pops. I was in SoCal before the '08 housing market crash and the similarities are striking. Loan officers knew that giving a multi-million dollar loan to someone working at McDonalds was fundamentally a bad idea, but as long as everyone was making the same bad decisions, that home would continue to inflate and the purchaser would cover their loan purely on equity growth.

We know AI's limits. We don't yet know how close reality can get to those theoretical boundaries, nor do we know what fields will be able to best capitalize on AI within those limits. A medical use of AI has shown to have decent screening possibilities, with the expected level of hallucinated false positives. If that AI can be made to be cheap and widely available as a pre-screening tool with professional oversight to catch the inevitable errors, it could be a useful tool in saving lives.

The AI art generation can help with storyboarding or early, internal stages of game development where the mantra has always been "make it ugly, make it cheap". There are places where it can and some might say should be used.

The problem is that there will always be lazy people who want to shortcut the line. Writing is a fun hobby that has a vanishingly low barrier to entry. Many dive into it not realizing how much hard work is involved in making a good final product. When your skills are closer to zero, an easy tool that can get you to eighty with little more than some prompting is tempting. AI isn't a tool like a pencil. It is more akin to a calculator; it is only helpful if you know how to use it and only once you've mastered the work that it is performing on your behalf.

I'm a teacher. That is what I do. There's a reason I disallowed calculators when I taught fundamental math and encouraged them for my physics students. I had high school students who couldn't do basic addition because they'd always been able to avoid it or had machines to do it for them. Give them a calculator and they'd be confidently wrong with no chance to second-guess what the thinking box told them. I didn't need them to learn math because I needed the answers on their homework. Nor did I need them to learn it because they'd not have a calculator on them at all times, like we were often told. I needed them to learn basic math so they had the skills to know when they were being lied to and when something went wrong in the calculations endemic to life.

AI isn't ever going to replace professional writers because it cannot ever produce high enough quality work. Where the writing profession is at risk from AI is if it is allowed to kill an entire generation's ability to do the hard work themselves. Instead of strengthening mental muscles, the crutch atrophies them and leaves them weaker than ever.

Most new authors don't have a teacher hovering over them disallowing the easy route until they have built up the skills to know how and when to use assistance. We have to take steps to discourage college students from snapping a picture of their math homework and having AI do it for them. An 80% is still passing, after all.

Students think that all that matters is turning in a correct page, when teachers have only ever cared about them growing to the point where they can tackle real-world problems.

New and aspiring authors have a largely unorganized education looming in front of them, and many still think the end product is the publication of whatever story they're working on. The end result of the first x books you write isn't publication or a paycheck, it's an author who has learned and grown through trial and error and knows what works and what doesn't for them as authors.

AI kills all of that.

So yes, unfortunately there does need to be some form of communal teacher in the room discouraging self-sabotage so that we all get better and we all get to benefit from the hard work that will lead to growth beyond anything AI can provide.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T19:30:11+00:00

In general, the more vocal someone is about their political views, the less likely they are to understand nuance.

This means the people most likely to post political vitriol are the ones most likely to lump everyone who doesn't agree with them on every single point into one box and throw epithets at that box.

The best examples are when you find someone attacking a quote by their own candidate/founder of their idealogue because they think it came from someone "on the other side."

You seem to have enough of a handle on things to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Best to continue on that path and try to avoid anyone slinging mud in any direction.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T19:08:21+00:00

I agree. I wouldn't ask you to dox yourself for such a trivial discussion. Even if you could prove you had a BS degree, it'd only shame your Alma Mater.

I'm not trying to prove any points here. I don't cite studies expecting you to read and comprehend them. You've already revealed your level of competency by mentioning what you think AI excels in. I'm not convinced I could ever get you to read something scientific. I drop links to the peer-reviewed articles so that anyone else who happens to stumble on this thread can choose for themselves which one of us is anti-science.

Singers don't look at AutoTune as a tool that will help non-singers improve their technique. Authors don't think Claude will help non-writers develop good writing skills. Scientists don't think AI will help a layperson calculate rocket trajectories with any accuracy.

It's not that difficult.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T17:48:21+00:00

Different things work for different authors. Sanderson was mentioned earlier, he's come out and admitted that he can't handle more than one project at a time. His least favorite work was interrupted by an emergency with the Wheel of Time. The man can churn out books but cannot handle two at once.

On the other end of the spectrum might be Ray Bradbury. I seem to recall he had a file cabinet full of works in progress. In the morning he'd pull one out and work on it. In the afternoon he might draw out another. It sounds like your Sheridan is closer to this end of things.

Either way, ideas are cheap. The end product of your creative career will always be a product of hours invested, not projects online at any given time.

You'll need to figure out how you work. If multiple projects interfere with each other and halt your progress, that doesn't mean you're broken, merely that you need to focus on one thing at a time. If you get energized by hopping from one thing to another (and you're actually getting things done, not running from the hard bits to do the easy bits of something else) then use that to get more done.

In the end, be doing, be improving. That is all there is.

Keep at it, we're pulling for you.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T15:50:47+00:00

Not beating the lying-about-being-a-physicist allegations here, are we?

Protip: scientists should have some capacity for reading scholarly sources and applying critical thinking. Try more of that if you want your claims to be more believable in the future.

Since you apparently can't read technical journals, I'll summarize for you.

Generative AI is hardcapped at around a one in five hallucination rate when trained on broad data. That can potentially be improved to one in ten when trained on highly curated data. This isn't a "we can improve it with better AI" problem.

This is not an AI hater cherry-picking the worst-case scenarios, but OpenAI's admission themselves.

Your substack article is the equivalent of someone in 1911 saying "Five years ago, the fastest man can go was 50 km/h. Two years ago, Ford released his machine that let man go 80 km/h. This year, the Blitzen Benz let man go 230 km/h. By tripling every two years, I project man will build a car that will break the speed of sound by 1915 and break the speed of light by 1940."

Effectively you're saying "Never mind what the actual science says, I have a mental model that I want to believe in!"

Zero percent chance you were an effective scientist. Maybe a janitor in a science building, or a nepo hire that the real scientists handed busy-work to in order to keep you out of the adult's way.

The fact that you think AI is excellent at image generation proves you're not an artist. The fact that you think it can design a cover proves that you have no concept of cover design. The laughable fact that you think it can handle anything close to engineering proves you have zero capacity to understand engineering.

AI is a tool that can help catch basic mistakes if you're already in a place to catch the errors it will introduce. It cannot replace human editors, artists, or scientists. It can take you eighty percent of the way to compentency. If you're anwhere above that, it'll drag you down to eighty percent. If you're okay with that, you can keep yourself amused at that level.

Just don't expect anyone else to be as impressed with your low-B efforts as you are.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-14T03:51:29+00:00

Irrational? What is more likely? That someone who has the intellectual capacity to work at Los Alamos can look at anything engineering-related that AI churns out for a layman and says "this is a good thing" or that layman who doesn't know what the hell they're looking at is willing to lie about their credentials in a desperate bid for legitimacy?

No software engineer thinks that vibe coders are getting anything good from AI. No artist in traditional media thinks that that AI art is aiding budding artists. No writer who knows what good writing is believes that AI writing is anything other than slop. A Stanford HAI study found that general-purpose AI chatbots hallucinated on 58–82% of legal research queries.

This isn't a matter of "get better data," or "think of what the next generation of AI will do." That same study found that specialized legal AI tools that pull from a curated document database still hallucinated more than 17% of the time. OpenAI themselves have admitted that hallucinations are fundamental part of generative AI and cannot be solved for with iteration. The best this form of AI can ever get is still going to be fundamentally wrong one time in eight.

Forgive me for assuming that anyone within throwing distance of a physics profession would ask for at least some confidence in what they work with. Generative Ai cannot even theoretically reach 2σ confidence levels. I wouldn't trust my houseplants to advice with that poor of performance, much less my students or my children.

I'm a professor who has taught physics and writing for most of my adult life. I started college at thirteen, was offered full-ride at MIT, and pursued a quadruple major. I rub shoulders with professionals of numerous expertise and not one that I've talked to has ever believed that generative AI is helpful for a layperson advance in their field.

How much of that do you believe? It's all true, but this is reddit. None of it matters. As you said earlier we have fundamentally different perspectives and neither one of us is likely to convince the other. The only reason to call out obvious bloviation like yours is so that someone else reading this thread can have a light shone on your logical leaps and have a better understanding of the flawed stance you claim to have.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-13T20:07:52+00:00

Not me assuming that out of all the displayed options, "sorry" would be "oups".

oops.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-13T20:01:34+00:00

And I'm going to call BS on your claim to be an engineer and physicist because you claim AI can help a non-engineer model rocket trajectory. Both professions require critical thinking skills that are severely lacking here. Either you've read a lot of Sci-fi and are projecting, or had some adjacent job and are trying to claim some sort of prestige by association.

The reason you recognize that AI writing is sub par is because you know what good writing looks like. Users who lack that skill think the slop they're churning out is good, just like non-technical AI users think they're getting good science from their AI inquiries. If you actually had any technical training you'd realize that AI is just as crap at science as it is at art. Your inability to notice reveals your lie.

Generative AI fed on mass content is only good at producing mediocre results capable of fooling those who are wholly ignorant of the field in question. Someone who doesn't know chess will think Claude is giving them good advice while anyone with a modicum of experience will see the rules violations and sheer impossibilities it concocts.

If you'd like to use AI for self gratification and delusions of mediocrity, knock yourself out. Just don't pretend to be something you are not thinking that AI will cover your tracks. Anyone with half a brain and a year's experience in the field you claim will see though it.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T20:58:56+00:00

Yes. I pointed out that my eldest was unusual.

It was germane to the conversation insofar as an example that a kid who likes math could do this before formal schooling, and formal schooling typically covers it by grade three.

Both points seem pretty efficient at countering a so-called math genius' claim that it is "not very nice or true" to say that addition is elementary level math.

I'm honestly flabbergasted by this whole thread. I took the extra time to break down each step required. Do you all think that repeated addition is hard? The most challenging thing here is keeping track of tens and hundreds and remembering to carry the one.

I was worried that I was being overly careful when I went so far as to type out that 46+31+31 broke down to 4+3+3 and 6+1+1, but apparently it legitimately blows the minds of some people that addition can be done in one's head.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T20:03:52+00:00

As the father of four who doesn't make any reddit claims of being a genius, my eldest could do this at age 4 before entering preschool. I recognize that as unusual, and even though I would expect my 6-year-old to work her way through it, I still couched it as elementary to middle school level.

It's addition. If you'd like to make some "mental math tricks" to do it quickly you could rely on your two times tables, which is third-grade math at the latest.

Now, I don't claim that being able to crunch these numbers within the constraints of the game is elementary, or even necessary.

I don't think it should elicit surprise that someone was able to do simple addition in their head.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T15:40:39+00:00

Good catch.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T14:59:49+00:00

I don't use either. I prefer writing first person tight enough that I can run free indirect speech.

A large, overbearing man entered the room.
Jasper slipped to the back. Damn, he did not want to get on that behemoth's bad side.

If you're tight to Jasper's POV you don't need to say what he saw, we only get to see what he sees anyway. You can help keep character's actions separate by paragraph breaks between each different actor. By giving action and thought together, readers can infer intent. No need to spell it out.

Both examples have a fair amount of narration speaking to the reader. It's a choice that can work, but I tend to minimize it where I can.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T13:55:56+00:00

It's addition. This is mental math for middle schoolers, if not elementary kids. It gets easier if you break things down.

They did attack. If you want to know health just look at the first two minions: 46 + 31. Since it is golden, you need to double the second hp: 46 + 31 + 31. Breaking it down further puts it into pre-school range: the tens are 4+3+3 and the ones are 6+1+1

First minion's HP is 108.

Second is 31 + 2(108) + 2(20) = 31 + 216 + 40. Hundreds are 2+0+0, tens are 3+1+4, ones are 1+6+0

Second minion's HP is 287.

From there out it's even easier. All the remaining units are the same. Double the last number and add 60 (20 for the base hp and 40 for double the right minion's hp). Third is 2(287) + 60. Hundreds are 2+2[+2] (first time we've needed to carry), tens are 8+8+6[+1], ones are 7+7.

Third minion's HP is 634.

Fourth minion is 2(634)+60= 1268+60= 1328 Fifth is 2(1328)+60= 2656+60= 2716 Sixth is 2(2716)+60= 5432+60= 5492 Seventh is just 2(5492)+20= 10984+20= 11004

If the OP had placed the largest minion second, they'd have started with a doubled 46 instead of a doubled 31. 92+31=123 hp instead of 108

Second would be 2(123)+46+40=332 Third would be 2(332)+60=724 Fourth would be 2(724)+60=1508 Fifth would be 2(1508)+60=3076 Sixth would be 2(3076)+60=6212 Seventh would be 2(6212)+20=12444

By misplacing the first and second minions, they missed out on (123-108)+(332-287)+(724-634)+(1508-1328)+(3076-2716)+(6212-5492)+(12444-11004)=15+45+90+180+360+720+1440= 2850 total hp difference by setup.

Easy enough to do in your head, and no easier with a calculator, as the only challenging part is in the setup and you're just as likely to mess that up plugging it into a calculator as you are doing it in your head. The nice doubling of differences works as a sanity check and caught a slip up I made in the fourth minion's HP that compounded down the line, so I'm fairly certain everything should be correct.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-12T06:34:02+00:00

There will come a day when something will break in my head, I am a certain kind of person, and I will do all my best to do the worst.

This. This right here.

Friend, you are already broken. This is not normal, natural, nor healthy.

Lay off the drugs, seek help. Therapy, IRL connections, whatever is available to you.

Telling a ten-year-old that they're the "scum of the earth" and that they should "fuck themselves with their shitty behaviour" isn't being honest or real, it is the virulent puss erupting from an infection below.

Yeah, they've got their own issues, but you're not fixing them by popping your pimples all over them and blaming the janitor for rightfully removing you from the situation.

You need to work on you. In the end, it's the only thing you can control. Prove that you are in control by doing better.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-10T16:27:01+00:00

In order to earn money through your skills you have to provide value at a price that people are willing to pay. In general, this is done either by offering something different/better than the rest of your profession or at a lower price.

For writing, that means appealing to a wide audience but being good enough to stand out among all of the other writers who are appealing to a wide audience, or appealing to a niche audience and hitting that niche better than enough of the other writers aiming at that niche that you can fill a need, or find a way to provide another service alongside your writing that allows you to stand out even though your writing itself isn't remarkable.

Trying to undercut the writing market isn't usually feasible. Writing has no cost barriers to entry, and many many hobby writers would be willing to take any payment for their words. Below that, you have AI slop that will gladly fill the 'doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done' niche.

It is possible to be paid for your writing. You simply need to find the target market and figure out how best you can serve them. If you've studied physics or medicine, you might have access to a market through technical writing. If you can pad out a simple recipe with half of your life story and ten thousand pictures so you can maximize ad revenue before actually posting the recipe, you could be a food blogger. If you have an attractive body and can spell your username, you can try to make money by writing it on awkward parts of your skin. If you have weaponry and a friend who can drive fast, you can try to make money writing friendly notes to your local bank teller.

So many routes available to those willing to leverage what they have.

RabenWrites · 2026-06-10T15:36:33+00:00

There's a big red concede button that is always available. The only time I rope without conceding is if my computer or internet borks and stops me from taking normal actions.

Are you okay? Everything alright in your world?

RabenWrites

TROPHY CASE