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Comment by Traster

14 hours ago

I'm actually not that worried about this, because again I would classify this as a problem that already exists. There are already idiots in senior management who pass off bullshit and screw things up. There are natural mechanisms to cope with this, primarily in business reputation - if you're one of those idiots who does this people very quickly start just discounting what you're saying, they might not know how you're wrong, but they learn very quickly to discount what you're saying because they know you can't be trusted to self-check.

I'm not saying that this can't happen and it's not bad. Take a look at nudge theory - the UK government created an entire department and spent enormous amounts of time and money on what they thought was a free lunch - that they could just "nudge" people into doing the things they wanted. So rather than actually solving difficult problems the uk government embarked on decades of pseudo-intellectual self agrandizement. The entire basis of that decades long debacle was based on bullshit data and fake studies. We didn't need AI to fuck it up, we managed it perfectly well by ourselves.

Nudge theory isn't useless, it's just not anything like as powerful as money or regulation.

It was taken up by the UK government at that time because the government was, unusually, a coalition of two quite different parties, and thus found it hard to agree to actually use the normal levers of power.

This NY Times opinion piece by Loewenstein and Ubel makes some good arguments along these lines: https://web.archive.org/web/20250906130827/https://www.nytim...