GoKawiilOne of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!
He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.
Regular humans hit on this idea about a century ago; my most generous interpretation of what he was telling me was that he’d hit on a kind of naive, confused version of Structuralism; Saussure via a game of telephone. (There has been recent work on a similar point, which argues that one needs to understand LLMs via literary theory, but it starts with Saussure.) I tried to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, not least because he seemed frustrated that I didn’t see things exactly as he did — a new behavior and likely a symptom of LLM overuse.
There is a certain amount of hubris required to throw oneself at an unsolved problem. But elsewhere, that hubris is a liability.
Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.
At its most absurd nadir, one is reminded of Juicero, a company that sold a $400 juicer that did the same work as squeezing its proprietary juice packs with one’s bare hands.
Look, discovering something that’s new to you is exciting — ask anyone who listened to me yell about the joys of European (higher-fat) butter — but you can’t take for granted that something that’s new to you is new to everyone. These things have in common a certain incuriosity that I have found endemic among a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship. Perhaps they have been so siloed that they did not realize their “discovery” was well -known elsewhere, or perhaps their self-conception is that they are the smartest, and if they don’t know something, no one knows it.
There is a certain amount of hubris required to throw oneself at an unsolved problem — you have to believe you can solve it. But elsewhere, that hubris is a liability. It leads you to do weird things, like announce that Freud invented introspection and that it is a bonus that you simply do not engage in it.
Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer
When I think I have observed something important, my first impulse is to go to a library, or Wikipedia, or a person who I think may be knowledgeable, and see what else has been observed. For instance, when I had a concussion, I wanted to see if anyone else had written about what it was like to recover — the dry medical descriptions did very little for me. When I couldn’t easily find an account, I wrote my own. I still receive emails about it, years later, from people who are doing the same search I did, following their own concussions. But doing something like this requires you to take for granted that other people are smart, that smart people have always existed, and that very little in the human experience is new. That requires, you know, intellectual humility — and a willingness to think about other people’s experiences.
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