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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> The EU thinks

I understand that it helps to have a name for something like this, but there is no "EU". "It" cannot think.

Heed the Meehan quote; "Men are at war because each man is at war with himself". It's not just that human minds are one psychotic insight away from seeing our dissociative identity disorder just beneath the surface... evey institution and collective is the same. What is wrong in the "EU" (principally the Commission) is that it's large and disparate enough for some extraordinary bad actors to hide within it and exercise undue toxic influence. It is by lack of transparency that they cannot easily be rooted out, named, shamed and dislodged.

Meanwhile much of the "EU" functions very well, and cares for its citizens.

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I need to clarify. I was using "the EU thinks" as shorthand for "the strong consensus view of the people running the EU". I thought (obviously wrongly) that this was obvious because an organisation cannot think.

I think it is safe to assume that the majority of people running the EU share the aim of "ever closer union" enshrined in EU treaties, which implies aiming to put the interests of the EU above national interests, which I took to be what the comment I was replying to meant by being "one big happy family"

> I was using "the EU thinks" as shorthand for "the strong consensus view of the people running the EU".

Understood. And I was questioning the concept of "consensus" in that frame.

> I thought (obviously wrongly) that this was obvious

Not at all. I don't think that is obvious. Interestingly some are raising GPT as a metaphor for emergent organisational "thinking". Is it a good analogy? I don't know, but we do see similar phenomena in networks whether they be human brains, machines or other organisms. And one feature is that we are not sure how to locate "consensus". There's lot more than weighted sums at play. And despite official structures and protocols, that's not really how things work, I think we all know.

Thus the emergent identity gets a lot attributed to it, which it may not be "aware of" in large parts of itself. For minds we have the concept of the unconscious. Perhaps in neural networks we will come to recognise something similar. But the concept seems sadly lacking in organisational dynamics where it might help us to stop talking about ideas such as "What Google says" or "What the market demands".

> because an organisation cannot think.

And yet we so often talk as if they can. We see Searle's "Chinese Room" everywhere and wish to encapsulate and name too readily.

The "EU" is "mentally unhealthy" in that sense. in that it's simply too big and disparate to be coherent and consistent. The article about snooping on web TLS certificates could not more clearly contradict other strongly held "beliefs" within the organism about "privacy".

The EU thinks in the same way GPT-4 does. In a way we really don't have a good way to describe, but it does do something close.

That might have be more helpful if it was clear that there is actually anything like thinking going on in GPT-4, but to the extent there is I don't believe it's a good analogy for EU-the-organization.

It's multiple regular humans doing regular human thinking (in various quantities) and otherwise acting, and interacting, subject to social pressures.

Calling that an organization thinking might be a convenient shorthand, but as I far as I'm concerned the utility stop right there, and forgetting that it is merely a shorthand is potentially badly misleading (which, I take it, was one major point of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38182349 )

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