Why do you believe that?

Even if we assume that reality itself is self-consistent (what does that even mean?), why would that imply that we humans are able to find a self-consistent representation of it? Maybe reality is self-consistent in some sense but cannot even be represented by the tools we use for theory building.

My point being, the ultimate target of our understanding may be self-consistent, but the way we _necessarily_ have to reduce it to lossy theories means that we can only ever approach it with a non-zero error. And a theory focusing on one aspect, minimizing representational error from one direction of approaching it, necessarily has to make assumptions that will contradict those made by another theory trying to minimize representational error coming from another direction / domain.

What do you mean by "successful at life" here? Genuine happiness, fulfillment in life? Or in the sense of doing well by what society holds as it's current interpretion of what one should strive for, and otherwise just kinda drifting through life?

Because if it's the latter, I'd say that is to be expected. It's much simpler to put your energy into fulfilling the expectations of whoever is your superior in your current group, mostly get the expected reward, and then just coast. Reflection and experimentation, which is required to get to self-consistent views, takes effort and and the willingness to question existing beliefs, which will also be uncomfortable times.

Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.

Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.

Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.

A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.

Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.

But that requires:

1. the technical ability for such fine-grained scoping / permissions

2. actually taking the time to think about what you want to achieve with the agent and what the smallest set of permissions / capabilities is for it to achieve it

Regarding 1., I think this will come, we're still in the wild west phase of agent usage. It'll be interesting to see which abstraction(s) will turn out to be the best interface for humans designing agents (minimize friction for finding and defining scope and permissions) and to limit agent capabilities (again finding the best trade-off between level of detail possible for defining capabilities and the ease of use of actually doing it).

Regarding 2., well, that's still the core problem that's always prevented the construction of high quality software, isn't it? Taking the time to properly think it out,and then taking the time to properly implement it. Which goes counter to the "move fast and break things" approach of people throwing agents at everything.

There's a very interesting opportunity here for a deeper investigation.

- What does "regression to the mean" actually mean in practice when the LLM is conditioned on a possibly large amount of context?

- How does this perceived regression to the mean affect the result in different applications? When implementing code, it may show up as keeping it simple, hence easily understandable, "nonclever". When writing documentation, it may show up as simple language, short sentences, etc. supporting the intent of communicating with little friction to a broad audience. When brainstorming product ideas, it may show up as regurgitating old and boring ideas, but dressed in fancy language and affirmations that hide the shallowness of the content.

- What can be done to alter this behavior? Now that temperature doesn't seem to be a parameter anymore in new models, how can we steer creativity of the model?

- If the model's creativity is fundamentally limited, is there a way we can use it to support us in the expression of our creativity, leveraging the different strengths of humans and LLMs in a way that the result transcends the limits of either?

Unfortunately, I don't see the article doing that. And, while I know pointing out LLM-isms is often a cheap shot these days, I feel compelled to point out that this article is full of what I perceived as LLM-ism, quite ironic given the premise and the statement ("written off-distribution · on purpose").

E.g.

> Trained on the past, it answers in the past tense of thought. Not what is true. What is typical.

> We converge — not on what is right, but on what is average.

> Not the answer it was sure of — the one it would not stop correcting

Not sure about taking it down to the level of consciousness, but makes sense regarding the sense of self, the conceptual experiencer, the perceived center of experience. It agrees well with the observation I have made again and again they my sense of self is much stronger when I'm around people, and stronger still when I'm in a context where I don't know people and/or am uncertain in social rules.

This can be as immediate as dancing in a club, and closing my eyes I feel open, free, still, the body just flowing, then opening my eyes and feeling the cage of categorization of the world, relating my self to other people as a major function, coming right back.

Also being alone in nature for me makes the sense of self drop. Without intention, spending even just a few hours alone in a forest seems to quiet down the part modeling my self in relation to the world so much. There's no need for it there. I'm not a person in a forest; I become the trees, the birds, the rustling of the leaves, the sun shining through the canopy.

Even if we know it's a machine we're interacting with, since the instructions we give are so similar in form to how we interact with people, I'd be very surprised if those interactions wouldn't affect how we communicate in general. After all, we are creatures of habit to a much larger degree than most would like to admit.

So I'm in the same boat: I'd much rather "look silly" being polite / kind to a machine, than have the most effective way of using it decay the kindness I'm habituated to express towards people.

This depends on where you're looking for "successful" people.

I generally agree with you - of those people who might report "revelations" through hallucinogenic drugs, the majority may misinterpret their drug-induced experience and hence be more confused / lost than before.

On the other hand, it can still be true that among those who eventually do have genuine spiritual insight, having used hallucinogenic substances is overrepresented compared to the general population.

Quoting from [1], where the author tried to find spiritually advanced individuals:

> Approximately 52% of participants had used hallucinogenic drugs at some point; none reported these as the trigger that led to PNSE.

PNSE = Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience.

My point is: while there are certainly people who go way overboard with the LLM stuff, that is not at odds with skillful use of LLMs being overrepresented in successful people.

I see now that you didn't make that point, but I already typed this all out and I'm gonna leave it.

[1] https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Is that generally the case though? I'm about two years into my first job in the industry and that's exactly my experience, and certainly frustrating...

PITA - pain in the ass

SVM - support vector machines HMM - hidden Markov model EM - expectation maximization GMM - gaussian mixture model HTK - hidden Markov model tool kit

Can you expand on that? Even just conceptually that sounds really hard, how would you know whether you're measuring genuine (unexpected) changes in the environment rather than the result of (possibly sophisticated and coordinated) deliberate manipulation?