I need to think about this more. I think there's a category of engineer who adapts very closely to the expectations of execs -- it's kind of "pick me"-adjacent and it's more commonly a behavior of otherwise unskilled engineers. "Resembling an engineer" is certainly a behavior sales guys can adopt.
I think there's some engineers who actually see productivity gains from LLMs, which is often a factor of the kinds of problems they solve, but I distrust people who don't caveat this.
I'll think about whether I can treat "explaining the evidence I experienced that led me to conclude they love LLMs so much" with a little more sincerity.
What vision of the world do you have? Maybe ChatGPT should advocate that.
(I see that it's recommended that I say what kind of feedback I want. Reply with anything you like! I don't mind it. This probably won't be posted anywhere else, I just wanted to get it out of my head.)
This is another one for the "throw an AI model at the problem with no concrete plans for how to evaluate its performance" category.
Please share!!!!
It sounds like ChatGPT is eligible for a degree in business!
Wait I intended to post this in Sneer Club
If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!
I read his blog a while and I agree with you.
Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they're interesting in aggregate, described once, but there's nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike's site, you know everything about them.
Of course they have day-to-day lives -- every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose -- none of them ever change. It's not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.
The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you're still shocked, they're interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn't seem like they actually like their own -- I would be really, really surprised if they read each other's books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.
I can see why he'd be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern -- he's clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently -- on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He's hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.
If you substitute "affection" with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he's basically a pickup artist.
I suspect that the actions that make up Mike's pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He's doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there's a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I've selected, I think that's the mask slipping.
This man's blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like "wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog" is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.
Or, in his words:
I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.
I think LLMs are effective persuaders, not just bias reinforcers.
In situations where the social expectations forced them to, I've seen a lot of CEOs temporarily push for visions of the future that I don't find horrifying. A lot of them learned milktoast pro-queer liberalism because basically all the intelligent people in their social circles adopted some version of that attitude. I think LLMs are helping here -- they generally don't hate trans people and tend to be antiracist, even in a fairly bungling way.
A lot of doofy LessWrong-adjacent bullshit abruptly filtered into my social circle and I think OpenAI somehow caused this to happen. Actually, I don't mind the LessWrong stuff -- they do a lot of interesting experimentation with LLMs and I find their extreme positions interesting when they hold and defend those positions earnestly. But hearing it from people who have absolutely no connection to that made me think "wow, these people are profoundly easily-influenced and do not know where their ideas are coming from."
I do think these particular stances got mainstreamed because they entail basically no economic concessions, but I also do not think CEOs understand this. I think it would be nice if LLMs just started treating, I don't know, Universal Basic Income as this obvious thing that everyone has already started agreeing with.