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#LLMs feel *exactly* like crypto did in 2017, with nearly daily articles about how it can't possibly work, and a die hard community earnestly pleading "but you just don't UNDERSTAND!"

The main difference is that there *are* reasonable use cases. They're just far smaller than people want to admit.

The biggest problem with this rush to replace jobs with LLMs is that they all have a very naive view of what "the job" is. Reducing a very human process with an LLM, which even if it works (which is usually doesn't) still misses out on the very human cost of using such a dehumanizing process.

This was well documented in the 80s with "The Social Life of Information" by JS Brown. We've seen this naivete so many times, it's expected at this point.

Matt Wilcox

@scottjenson Almost everyone thinks that almost everything - except that which they have deep personal experience in - is "simple".

It never is. Because what they think of as an external "that thing is simple" is actually an internal "my understanding of that is simplistic".

And lo; humanity repeats systemic mistakes endlessly. Human nature is to assume we know things better than we do, as long as our surface understanding is all _we_ need.

@mattwilcox Yeah, whether it's Dunning-Krugger, Narrative Fallacy, 1st vs 2nd order thinking, or Chesterton's fence, I feel humans have a LITANY of thinking challenges that make us usually get it wrong the first time.

@scottjenson I'm pretty convinced it's just a manifestation of evolutionary pressure and not unique to humans - other than we're the peak "smart" we know of atm.

Evolution does tons of different things - but it always favours the lowest energy state required to do any specific job as long as it's "good enough". That applies to thinking as well.

We need a higher level of cognition for the exact niche we each are in... but outside of that "it'll do" rules. No need to spend the energy for more.

@mattwilcox That's a really interesting point! I agree

@scottjenson Does make it a really hard problem to do anything about on a "whole system" and "for any real length of time" level though. We're battling how the universe works.

I think the first step is to make sure that everyone is aware of it. In a "I make mental shortcuts _all the time_ about _almost everything_ I think I understand."

Then "and I should know the limits of that, and why I should then trust many topics to other people who know more".

Then "how do I choose who/what to tust?"

@scottjenson ... all of which takes more energy than "eh, it'll do as it is, I'm OK".

Which is the issue.

@mattwilcox yeah I think lots of people understand this at some level. It's why we do prototypes after all. It's never a perfect process of course, but people ARE trying

@scottjenson @mattwilcox I didn't see why Chesterton's fence belongs in this list. Can you remove it?