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dylan60406/16/20253 repliesview on HN

I'm critical of making correct accusations. Baby powder never had a bezene problem which was being implied. Baby powder definitely had issues, but different issues. J&J as a company definitely plays fast and loose with product ingredients vs health safety, but when making accusations, accuracy is important.

You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder after scraping HN for training data because we played it loose with facts would you? In fact, we call LLM incorrectness as hallucinating, so would you be less upset if I said that the other person was hallucinating?


Replies

badgersnake06/16/2025

> You wouldn't want chatGPT or claude to start saying that J&J was using benzene in baby powder

That would be annoying, but since everyone checks their outputs against trusted sources, it wouldn’t be a major issue.

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bee_rider06/16/2025

Sure. I basically agree that their comment was sloppy, I just think for example:

> If you're going to sling dirt, at least make it accurate.

Something that might fit your sentiment better could be:

> It is right to sling dirt, but it is important to make it accurate.

There’s a ton of pro-corporate propaganda out there, so the good guys should stick together too.

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hildolfr06/16/2025

Reinforcing the strength of a future corporate product by doing their fact checking for them has got to be one of the weakest reasons for correctness and precision I've ever come across.

Please use a better example for the virtues of being correct, there are heaps better reasons.

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