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Comment by pmaze | Hacker News Reader

The connections are meaningful to me in so far as they get me thinking about the topics, another lens to look at these books through. It's a fine balance between being trivial and being so out there that it seems arbitrary.

A trail that hits that balance well IMO is https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/pacemaker-principle/. I find the system theory topics the most interesting. In this one, I like how it pulled in a section from Kitchen Confidential in between oil trade bottlenecks and software team constraints to illustrate the general principle.

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Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing?

I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What else does this general principle apply to?

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am missing something here. But reading thought many of the supportive comments, it seems more likely that this is an LLM Rorschach test where we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them.

I love reading. These are great books. I would be excited if this tool actually helps point out connections that have been overlooked. However, it does not seem to do so.

> we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them

How is that different from having an insight yourself and later doing the work to see if it holds on closer inspection?

Don't ask me to elaborate on this, because it's kinda nebulous in my mind. I think there's a difference between being given an insight and interrogating that on your own initiative, and being given the same insight.

I don't doubt there is a difference in the mechanism of arriving at a given connection. What I think it's not possible to distinguish is the connection that someone made intuitively after reading many sources and the one that the AI makes, because both will have to undergo scrutiny before being accepted as relevant. We can argue there could be a difference in quality, depth and search space, maybe, but I don't think there is an ontological difference.

The one that you thought of in the shower has a much greater chance of being right, and also of being relevant to you.

Has it? Why?

Because humans aren't morons tasked with coming up with 100 connections.

Doesn't explain why a connection made in the shower has in essence more merit than a connection an LLM was instructed to come up with.

Not sure how to make it clearer. Look at the quality of this post, and compare it to your shower thoughts. I imagine you're not as stupid as the machine was.

> Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained?

This made me realize that so many influential figures have either absent fathers, or fathers that berated them or didn't give them their full trust/love. I think there's something to the idea that this commonality is more than coincidence. (that's the only topic of the site I've read through yet, and I ignored the highlighted word connections)

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