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Comment by lazide

2 days ago

This is the really hilarious ‘engineer thinking’ vs ‘normie’ thinking difference which rears its head sometimes.

after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?

As long as we can all pretend they were thoughtful and meaningful, and someone isn’t using AI when making it (or just picking random crap off the shelf, and they removed the price tags) or using AI when reading it (aka making a big show of opening it, and then throwing them in the trash immediately after the person leaves), then we all get along. It even looks like we’re doing a ton of work/spending a ton of money to make the other person happy.

Not that anyone does any of the things I’m describing, just being hypothetical, obviously.

I suspect it will be obvious enough shortly it will go the way of the ‘popcorn bucket’ fad or the like, but for now…

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lazide

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watwut  2 days ago

"Normies" actually prefer to get a paragraph long email rather then three pages saying the same thing. AI is NOT adding just a few socially expected niceties. It adds huge amount of fluff.

And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.

  • TeMPOraL  2 days ago

    > And what "normies" do with that is skimming it, ignoring majority of it and answering random part.

    Exactly that. For me, a lot of effort in structuring e-mails goes into making it look like text instead of bullet points, because some stupid social expectations, but then still making it bullet-pointed in nature, because if I don't, the typical normie recipient will do exactly what you said: ignore majority of it and answer random part.

    (And then they'll somehow screw it up anyway, and I'll still have to chase them after that one critical question they conveniently forgot to address.)

TeMPOraL  2 days ago

> after all, what’s the point of a giving someone a bunch of cheap flashy gifts for Christmas (instead of say, socks) either?

Making them feel good and "seen", obviously. This is perfectly expressible in "engineer thinking" (I won't say "quantifiable", because there's this meme that engineers see things in binary, whereas the reality is, math is perfectly fine with fuzzy ideas and uncertainty - it's the normies that can't handle those).

Hell, there are some game-theoretic approaches to maximize social ROI on gifts, but I won't go into those, especially that they tend to flip the sign on the return if the recipient learns about them.