People are far overconfident online for what they know. The definitive and confident tone most online commenters speak in should probably only be spoken by experts in their own fields.
I sometimes wonder if that is why LLMs can so confidently hallucinate — because they were trained on piles of overconfident human texts.
It's an interesting thing to ponder.
People should be suspicious of statements regardless of tone. Conmen, hackers, cult members, job applicants, and AIs are all trying to trick people who only listen to tone.
It takes a lot of cognitive work to doubt and analyze everything. It's not really feasible, is it?
Review enough code, and even 2 + 2 can look sus.
Where's the operator overload? ;)
In the garbage language that we dont use anymore. Right? Right!? :)
Unfortunately, due to budget cuts, we could not afford to vanquish all of the antiques in the architecture. We do have an infinite spell of Ben Gay, however....
well yeah but there's that legacy system, the replacement isn't ready for GA yet so...
As with many things, it becomes easier with practise. Also, you can pace accordingly: do I quickly read 10 articles today, or pick 2 and peruse them in depth?
It's also not really necessary a lot of the time. If some random person online confidently says that the newest tesla uses an engine which contains ball bearings made in Indonesia by child slaves, I don't have to spend the time to doubt and analyze that because it doesn't impact me personally. I'd only ever need to take the time to double check that if I were going to buy a tesla or before I went and spread that information around as if it were fact. How true or false it is doesn't affect my life in any way. It can just be something a random person said online and I can treat it as such.
Whenever you see information that sounds like it could be extremely important to you and your situation (and when being wrong could really hurt you) then no matter how authoritatively the information was delivered that's really when you should invest the time to verify it. Much of the time that investment is just a quick internet search anyway.
So safe the effort for the things that actually matter in your life.
People want to listen to folks who are confident.
And that sentence right there is an example of what I mean. I could write 10 words, 100 words or 1,000 words adding caveats to "People want to listen to folks who are confident," but most people don't want to hear it and they'd tune out. But nine words, they'll listen to and use that, even if it's not right all the time.
This isn't just an "online" issue. Anecdotally, I'd say it's in human nature. I've read plenty lamenting how men are (over)confident at work and garner (unwarranted) success relative to less confident women. And IME, confidence at work is pretty successful, if only because folks _try_ the confident suggestion. The person with a host of caveats might have a better suggestion, but they are less confident in their result, which folks sense and shy away from.
And then there are casual situations (which most of "online" discourse is), where I regularly see strangers confidently offer one another advice which is usually received positively. A lot of the advice is wrong, but that doesn't really matter.
The LLMs that I have worked with have no concept of "true" and "false". They have no sense of confidence in what they sense.
They _phrase_ it definitively because that's what we want.
"What is the capital of Australia."
"The capital of Australia is Timbuktu."
The LLM doesn't know if that's true. It's just making a statement we asked it to make.
There is a reason con man is short for confidence man.
People are extremely susceptible to someone who sounds confident.