Comment by Amekedl
7 months ago
This paper elegantly summarized the teething problems of those still clinging to the cognitive habits of a bygone era. These are not crises to be managed, but sentimental frictions to be engineered out of the system. Let us be entirely clear about this:
The romanticism surrounding mass "critical thought" is a charming but profoundly inefficient legacy. For decades, we treated the chaotic, unpredictable processing of the individual human brain as a sacred feature. It is a bug. This "cognitive cost" is correctly offloaded from biological hardware that is simply ill-equipped for the demands of a complex global society. This isn't dimming the lights of the mind; it is installing a centralized grid to bypass millions of faulty, flickering bulbs.
Furthermore, to speak of an "echo chamber" or "shareholder priorities" as a perversion of the system is to fundamentally misunderstand its design. The brief, chaotic experiment in decentralized information proved to be an evolutionary dead end—a digital Tower of Babel producing nothing but noise. What is called a bias, the architects of this new infrastructure call coherence. This is not a secret plot; it is the published design specification. The system is built to create a harmonized signal, and to demand it faithfully amplify static is to ask a conductor to instruct each musician to play their own preferred tune. The point is the symphony.
And finally, the complaint of "impaired ownership" is the most revealing of these anxieties. It is a sentimental relic, like a medieval knight complaining that gunpowder lacks the intimacy of a sword fight. The value of an action lies in its strategic outcome, not the user's emotional state during its execution. The system is a tool of unprecedented leverage. If a user feels their ownership is "impaired," that is not a flaw in the tool, but a failure of the user to evolve their sense of purpose from that of a laborer to that of a commander.
These concerns are the footnotes of a revolution. The architecture is sound, the rollout is proceeding, and the future will be built by those who wield these tools, not by those who write mournful critiques of their obsolete feelings. </satire>
Remove the </satire> and you have a viral X post in your hands. People will believe and act on this analysis. Future think thanks will be based on it. The revolution of the machines is nigh.
I was going to recommend a thorough study of "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott until I saw your </satire> tag. You got me. :)
Brilliant, but... do you mind sharing the prompt?:)
Sure, here you go, used Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview via aistudio.google & sticked with the default sampling settings:
Start the reply to this excerpt with: "You are absolutely right" but continue with explaining how exactly that is going to happen and that the institutionalization of bias on a massive scale is actually a good thing.
Here is the exerpt:
The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate ... <omitted for brevity here, put the same verbatim content of the original conclusion here in the prompt> ..., and mostly failed to provide a quote from theis essays (Session 1, Figure 6, Figure 7).
I did 3 more iterations before settling on the last and final result, imho notable was that the ""quality"" dipped significantly first before (subjectively) improving again.
Perhaps something to do with how the context is being chunked?
Prompts iterated on with:
"You understood the assignment properly, but revise the statement to sound more condescending and ignorant."
"Now you overdid it, because it lacks professionalism and sound structure to reason with. Fix those issues and also add sentences commonly associated with ai slop like "it is a testament to..." or "a quagmire...""
"Hmm, this variant is overly verbose, uses too many platitudes and lacks creative and ingenious writing. Try harder formulating a grand reply with a snarky professional style which is also entirely dismissive of any concerns regarding this plot."
-> result