Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?

theatlantic.com

10 pointsapparent14 comments

I sometimes think people are hallucinating due to the predictive coding of the brain. Small compressed messages like small talk can get uncompressed into narratives, controlled hallucinations of sort that define social fictions that people navigate.

Does it have relevance here? I dunno. I just thought of this when I saw "hallucination"

As an autistic person, this really resonates. People hallucinate so much context into the simplest of things.

Same. I have been wondering that it could be a promising AI feature to implement typical human subconscious like heuristic features.

Like message compression - context expansion heuristic policies.

Gotta be autistic to think of this stuff cuz if your subconscious contains different policies then comparison with typicals can help to find patterns that can be later implemented as code too.

https://archive.is/NTb3Y

Journalist discovers people using analogies ...

The author realizes this later in the article, but still seems to conjure up something about technology being special in this regard. It's not. I've got an ace up my sleeve. I hit a home run. There you go.

Everyone warns about folks jumping to personify AI but there is probably just as big of a risk of AI-ifying people.

Not necessarily a "risk".

Some people treat their agents better than they do their colleagues. Sometimes the colleagues have it coming, sometimes not. Sometimes it's one's own fault. Agentic interactions can help you orient yourself through what's what. Lots of posts about engineers getting their first taste of project mgmt through this recently, for example.

Or take customer service. Dehumanizing people is generally bad, but sometimes it's downright appropriate. You don't want to get bogged down by some rando throwing a tantrum, that's in no one's interest.

I noticed some time ago, at least on HN, that almost no one refers to "people" anymore, only to "humans," with a sort of clinical detachment.

I don't know if it's part of the same phenomenon but it is kind of creepy, like realizing you're surrounded by replicants.

We'd be using "human" in the same way if we'd met an alien race, for example.

LLMs are not alive, of course, nor will they be. But personally I think that artificial sentience counts as a distinct lifeform just as much as aliens would.

But I think it's pretty unambiguous that there's a difference between "person" and "homo sapiens". That's why people are using the term human to disambiguate. Our current level of "AI" are not persons, but an artificial sentience would most certainly be, as would be aliens, and certain animals on Earth once we learn to communicate with them.

It might make sense in a hypothetical future where artificial sentience exists, or where we live alongside aliens. But an aversion to using the term "people" to disambiguate from things that aren't actually real and necessary to disambiguate from is still odd.

Really? I don't think I've ever written the word "humans" here, except perhaps when distinguishing people from rats/mice/etc.

I also don't recall seeing people use "humans" excessively, or in a way that sounded off to me.

Yes, really.

Different people can interpret the same social phenomena in different ways and subjective experience can differ between individuals. That your experience differs from mine doesn't negate mine.

There are objectively far more hits when you search HN comments for "people" than "humans". So while I would not negate your experience, I would say that your assertion that "at least on HN, almost no one refers to "people" anymore". There are 5 million hits that would say otherwise, more than 3x as many for "humans".

You may be right. It seems like a thing but I may just be oversensitive.

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