Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

@Dex ... wow. Y2wow, even.

So completely separate from all of the everything this evening, I realized something on this:

What is a middle manager? Well, someone like Michael Lopp would say: they help solve the quadratic communication problem of every engineer talking to each other engineer, taking it from O(n^2) to O(n). They also perform expected value calculations, which states that given the same game and odds infinitely run, a higher than 50% weighted average comes out ahead, and the better weighted average the better the decision.

What exactly is an LLM? Well, it's a system performing Bayesian-esque analysis on words, phrases, and image data, then running forward the most likely results.

It makes perfect sense why middle managers think this thing can replace humans, when it adequately articulates their lived experience as managers. And it's just attribution bias for that to go from "this is like talking to the people I talk to every day" to "this is like talking to everyone."

Fewer words: chatgpt talks like a manager, and manager types confuse that with being a person. Yikes, but it makes a funhouse mirror amount of sense.

There's a reason why the last gambit is always trying to knock everyone else down and force everyone to love them. They just can't get there, despite infinite wealth and resources.

It's... comforting in a way, but I wish they had just sought therapy and tried picking up a paintbrush instead?

All the last decade of fictitious internet money, putting databases and dumb apes on the blockchain, and confusing chatbots for human-level AI has taught me is:

Techbros and billionaires literally cannot even conceptualize what creativity is or what it means to be loved. Look what they need to mimic even a fraction of our power.

@gardevoir (... yet we contain myriads, and it really only helps explain and cover the laziest of decisions, from reflexive lizard-brain to low information bean counting to templatized regurgitated nonsense that plausibly looks like text or art. So, uh.

Maybe the fact a glorified chatbot reflects that says something about the ways we can be better people and the parts that matter most.)

@gardevoir (But then, if decision-making based on probabilistic garage isn't an accurate description of, eg, middle management decisions, in which most of the decisions are low information choices based on expected value and paperclip maximization, I'm not sure what is. So maybe that really does explain some peoples' lived experiences in a number of cases?)

@gardevoir Someone on the Twitter machine awhile back said, to paraphrase: "maybe we should be less worried about bots passing the Turing test and more about how some people seem to fail it", and that sure has lived rent-free in my head for awhile.