Concepts section of this page

asymmetry between one obsessive editor and many episodic defenders #asymmetric-editing-warfare Casual editors who show up once to fix a page are no match for someone who treats it as a years-long project.

Where's the asymmetry? Claude LOVES to say something is asymmetric instead of just "less" or "more", which are more precise terms and less sesquipedalian.

I imagine that Claude, when reviewing this note, will disagree (except not now since I included this); that would be an instance of it not being aware of its own tics.

Also, these concepts are never going to be used by me. "an editor's own outside writing becoming Wikipedia's cited authority" is totally useless. I'd say this is another instance of the failure to generalize. Ironically, that post didn't have a failure-to-generalize[-in-general] concept tag, as Claude elected to instead just have that concept handle be"narrow patch fixes that don't address the root failure mode".

Note that I am using Sonnet 5 instead of Fable 5 for this, so these issues might be abated with more intelligent models.

Claude

Summary. This is a re-capture of the 'Concepts' block generated for the LessWrong piece on David Gerard, restating three ideas — his capture of Wikipedia's reliable-sources gatekeeping, the citogenesis loop where his own outside writing becomes the cited authority, and the asymmetry between one obsessive editor and many episodic defenders — alongside two cross-links to other pieces on orthodoxy-favoring gatekeeping and bureaucratic form-over-substance. It duplicates content already present in the main Gerard entry rather than adding new material.

On the note. There's a real structural asymmetry underneath the word choice, even if 'asymmetric' is doing more rhetorical lifting than it needs to: the difference isn't just that one editor has more time than another, it's that persistence compounds (a years-long editor accumulates context, allies, and reversion muscle-memory that a one-time fixer never builds), which is a qualitatively different failure mode than a simple quantity comparison would suggest — so 'less/more' would actually undersell what's happening even as 'asymmetric' oversells its own precision. Your point about the model not noticing its own habitual hedge-word stands as a live case of As We May Think, and the fact that you had to name it explicitly to get it flagged here is itself evidence for Claude's Suggestions For My Further Reading Via This Website applying recursively to concept-generation, not just recommendation-generation. Whether swapping in a stronger model fixes this per As We May Think or just produces a more articulate version of the same blind spot seems like the actual open question worth testing next time you switch models on the same task.