There are plenty of instances that show that in reality this is not what happens, and in fact this is often a necessary step of reinventing yourself if things really aren't working for you. The mid-life crisis is a famous example of this, or even the quarter-life crisis. In some specific psychological circles this is referred to as "disintegration". Sometimes carefully backtracking is simply not enough, and growth needs this kind large shock to the system.

The real challenge lies in properly tuning the strength of this filter, being deliberate with it and knowing what can be said, and what cannot be said. The people who act like robots err on the side of extreme caution, and are unwilling to invest time and effort into tuning and developing this filter. They also don't realize that this makes it impossible to connect with people, to their own demise.

I think there is some nuance though, but it's hard to articulate. I think that is because there are some long term effects that are currently invisible, but that can be anticipated. A lot of it is the human factor, and how changes to how people think and act may ripple through the organizations as well.

Things such as skill atrophy which may reduce not only immediate skills, but also adjacent skills that were maybe important for critical thinking and making good decisions. Or the fact that learning to use an LLM is a skill that is not truly grounded in reality and can therefore not translate well to other areas (you're essentially learning skills within the "reality" of the LLM, based on its weights). That is very different from machine code --> tools, where the tools make explicit assumptions that are based on the workings of the machine code (which is analytical in nature), and where you can, if you wish to, jump in to override those assumptions where needed without having to adapt to a mental model that operates in its own reality (i.e. the LLM's "thought process").

Not to say that knowing this difference has no merit, just saying that it has limits to how much it can do. After all, reality can also hit the brain, when it gets flooded by hormones and neurotransmitters that take away your rational thinking.

But if I have to think of my own experiences here, I would say that overly agreeable people become tiresome pretty quickly. To me their perspective does not offer anything of value without any pushback, as it certainly doesn't help with grounding my own thoughts. Perhaps it's why being too nice makes it difficult to form deeper bonds, and maybe paradoxically it is therefore a good thing that LLMs are overly agreeable.

It probably also depends on one's mindset - those who are interested in growing could be more likely interested in opposing views, while those who perceive that they have already "made it" (e.g. stars) perhaps don't care so much and prefer an agreeable tone.

Of course, you do not know this exactly, but the point is that it's easy to look at the wrong statistic and come to conclusions that are not necessarily useful in some context. The lens matters just as much as the percentage, if not more.

Particularly enjoyed his work for Duke Nukem 3D, you could easily tell the difference between the tracks made by Bobby and the ones made by Lee Jackson, Bobby's tracks were a bit darker and more gloomy, adding a lot of atmosphere.

Beautifully written article by the way, as the legend deserves.

For instance, you can put a lot of effort into something, without creating any value for yourself or for others. But it is often true that things of utility need a sufficient amount of compounded effort behind them before they become valuable, otherwise they are common and easy to obtain. Value is necessarily relative.

You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.

Also like some people hinted at this in sibling threads, I think it's different between purely abstract skills, and skills that involve muscle memory. For instance, I could probably stop using my bicycle for a very long time, and still not unlearn how to use it, or learn it again really quickly. Maybe it is because abstract skills are inherently more complex and require more cognitive effort and connections to knowledge overall, and are therefore more fragile.

In addition to your last paragraph: lots of things that we used to do the less efficient way had side-benefits that were not immediately obvious, probably because they compounded over time. Now that we're not doing them anymore, we notice all kinds of widespread societal problems (in particular among young people) that come up that were never there before.

However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.