> Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.
One guy is generalizing from "they don't work for me" to "they don't work for anyone."
The other one is saying "they do work for me, therefore they do work for some people."
Note that the second of these is a logically valid generalization. Note also that it agrees with folks such as Tim Gowers, who work on novel and hard problems.
No, that's decidedly not what is happening here.
One is saying "I've seen an LLM spectacularly fail at basic reasoning enough times to know that LLMs don't have a general ability to think" (but they can sometimes reproduce the appearance of doing so).
The other is trying to generalize "I've seen LLMs produce convincing thought processes therefore LLMs have the general ability to think" (and not just occasionally reproduce the appearance of doing so).
And indeed, only one of these is a valid generalization.