it's sad that c-suite believes the advice given by an LLM for a Platonically ideal software stack that looks nothing like the actual implementation moreso than their own ICs. it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else

never understood why someone would trust Claude's take on your codebase after it's read a 2% snippet of it over the advice of someone who has years worth of experience, who knows all the weird kludges and other quirks that were shipped MVP and never truly tackled as debt, whose done risk assessments and mapped dependencies and has the rough outline of all ADRs involved

I think it's always been true that bad leadership tends to become out-of-touch with the reality of the business over time especially if they don't know how to cultivate good working norms, favoring sycophants instead. with LLMs, that trend seems like it'll just get worse and worse

It's really going to be a top-down destruction of everything

Models are excellent at code but they are not people managers. My guess this will ultimately lead a bunch of companies to revert to average returns or fold.

Cal Newport was right.

Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:

If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.

When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".

Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.

We are so ******, am I right?

the most depressing part of this for me is that i know im not that bright, but i scrutinize llm results. then my execs are more or less professional confidence men whove been selling to each other for decades, but then they so easily fall for a confidence game? when i see them speak with confidence on AI they just sound like clowns to me now

Maybe it did enhance them, and maybe the assessment was correct at the same time.

There is no single effect of AI on work quality. Depends on use and effort. Use it well, it will be good, use it with close to zero effort and you'll get something distinctly better than what you could smash together manually with that much effort, but people will see that you indeed put zero effort in it, and also they will notice that you spent no effort in cleaning up AI tells because you likely can't even notice or have no idea about anything and will indeed correctly conclude you're less intelligent.

There may also be a miscalibration that's worse for people with less taste / judgment / intelligence / experience, in that it's indeed easier to produce things, but while the effort required is reduced, people expect and believe it to be reduced more than how much it is truly reduced so they overshoot and don't notice. Meanwhile, the right way to use it is to keep your usual effort level or drop it only a little, and simply produce better things.

The answer to this chaos is deceptively simple - people want to make money first and foremost, then they want the money to be recurring and somewhat stable, and then select few want to grow and make more money with new and latest tech, but not at the expense of what they already have.

Everything else is in service to this, anything that gets in the way of this is rejected and ignored.

Clearly Opus 5 was an overreaction to this then.

Hell yes a chatbot is going to have better judgment.

I worry about them. I also worry about myself -- what is working with these psychosis machines doing to me? Will I start sounding like that? Do I already? I am thinking about ways to insulate myself from this as much as possible.

Is AI psychosis the white collar black lung?

It’s more revealing the inability of many senior leaders to truly understand what’s happening in their companies and investing the time to understand what new things can do and don’t. Such weaker leaders tend to be extremely gullible for the latest new thing and ride the hype wave hard.

It’s easy to just go through the motions and press the easy button on the new shiny thing. It’s hard, and takes true leadership, to go against the grain and do what’s truly best over what’s cool or popular.

Most folks in these roles just aren’t that good and hence why they fell hard for the AI fluff and are starting to scramble hard now as that all begins to unravel.

First Blockchain, then DEI, then COVID, then AI.

Any of these completely filled the headlines to the exclusion of everything else and were used internally to solidify and extend your influence and keep people in check. Then they were dropped.

Managers need a mission, and AI will be abandoned soon as well in favor of a new religion.

Elites have been surrounding themselves by Yes Men for centuries. Is this any different, I wonder, or has there always been such a psychosis?

Quoting the article...

"Nearly half of senior leaders say they would trust a chatbot’s judgment over their own, on questions they were hired to answer."

If they're using it like an oracle, then that is worrying, but how worrying - practically speaking - would depend on the baseline prior to the use of AI and how that compares with what the AI is spitting out.

The first big hazard of this AI worship is, of course, the atrophy of reasoning skills. I don't think there's an especially distinct skill needed here. A rational person is able to evaluate claims made by others responsibly based on a combination of proxy signals like an earned reputation of trustworthiness, integrity, and authority, the logical coherence of the claim, and plausibility and the absence of contradiction between the claims and more certain baseline knowledge.

So, psychologically speaking, the ease with which we obtain credible-sounding answers is a major motivator, but two other cultural factors support this credulity, namely, magical & superstitious and the broad acceptance that bullshitting is an okay thing to do. Both weaken the ability to apprehend and reason about reality in different ways (bullshitting, for instance, reinforces a carelessness about and indifference to the truth; magical thinking more directly sabotages reason; both undermine confidence in reason and place stock in the sub-rational instead).