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by littlexsparkee·1mo ago·view on hn ↗
That new land has thin, acidic, waterlogged soil with few nutrients, is unstable and prone to collapse (see thermokarst), with photoperiods not suited for what those crops need. What's next is a world of hurt, especially if approached with techno-optimist myopia.
2 comments
It's fine. We can just add fertilizer -- made from petroleum extraction of course then fire up some coal power plants for artificial grow lights.

Thus solving the problem once and for all.

Thanks Gemini for your reply.

It is not worth discussing anything with a doomer that has no knowledge besides what an LLM can tell them.

That's a cheap dismissal - if you had any good counters, you would have attacked the reasoning instead of reaching for that.
No it's not, I'm perfectly willing to discuss the sibling comment. I'm not willing to discuss with an LLM with a human intermediary. Your answer parrots what Google (gemini) says when you search with a question targeted as disagreeing with me. (I tried, out of curiosity)
I already had the topsoil argument in mind before involving an LLM but your argument is that I shouldn't adopt more precise language or add claims I didn't originally think of because of the source? How is information from a search engine different? Should people purposely have shallower debates whereby they pretend not to know new information simply to appear organic / avoid LLM allegations? You would put an expert into the same bucket for having a comprehensive argument.
If you start with a doomer mentality it is already very unlikely that you have any wish to discuss anything, you just want to create a list of arguments that all end with some variation of "we're doomed".

Paired with an LLM which regardless will generally be ~80% agreeable with you, the conversation will literally be unending. After each point there will be a rebuttal of doom and very little reason involved on the human side in the middle. Unable to be convinced of anything and paraphrasing LLMs all along the way, the conversation is pointless.

If I wanted an endless disagreement with an LLM I could set that up in my own time, I don't have to do it in public. Or I could find a friendly toddler in their "Why?" phase.

If you'd like we can prime a couple of LLMs with our opinions and watch them go back and forth without us.

On the flipside, if you suffer from positivity bias you'd probably be able to ignore an existential threat if it spit in your face.
does not-ignoring an existential threat look like wailing THE END IS NEAR at every opportunity and coming up with no remotely viable suggestions besides a vague idea of shutting down the global economy and/or just endlessly saying we're not doing enough?
That's okay, hope you enjoyed your petty digs - the world is a simple closed system that just needs some sulfur pixie dust to patch up and all the scientists are doomers. Thanks for your contributions.