Hacker News Reader

Comment by clint | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to belittle or be mean, but what exactly did you assume about humans before you read this response? I find it facinating that apparently a lot of people don't think of humans as stochastic, non-deterministic black boxes.

Heck one of the defining qualities of humans is that not only are we unpredictable and fundamentally unknowable to other intelligences (even other humans!) is that we also participate in sophisticated subterfuge and lying to manipulate other intelligences (even other humans!) and often very convincingly.

In fact, I would propose that our society is fundamentally defined and shaped by our ability and willingness to hide, deceive, and use mind tricks to get what our little monkey brains want over the next couple hours or days.

View on HN

I knew that they worked this way, but the conciseness of the response and clean analogy to systems I know and work with all day was just very satisfying.

For example, there was probably still 10-20% of my mind that assumed that stubbornness and ignorance was the reason for things going slowly most of the time, but I'm re-evaluating that, even though I knew that delays and double-checking were inherent features of a business and process. Re-framing those delays as "evolved responses 100% of the time" rather than "10% of the mistrust, 10% ignorance, 10% .... " is just a more positive way of thinking about human-driven processes.

I totally understand this rationally if you sit down and walk me through the steps.

But there's a lot of reasons - ego, fear of losing... that core identity, etc. that can easily come back and bite you.

I'm not sure if this is the same as meditation and ego death or whatever. I find that even if you go down the spiritual route, you also run into the same issues.

People in philosophy also argue things like rational actors, self-coherency, etc.

And hey, even in this current moment you were able to type out a coherent thought, right?

I've noticed more and more that humans behave a lot like LLM's. In the sense that it's really, really hard to observe my true internal state - I can only try to find patterns and guess at shit. Every theory I've tried applying to myself is just "wrong" - in the sense that either it feels wrong, or I'll get depressed because the theory basically boils down to "you're lazy and you have to do the work" which is a highly emotionally evocative theory that doesn't help anyone.

This probably didn't make any sense but g'day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com