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- Hacker News
- I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
by edent - I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
Utterly idiotic.
by mccoyb - The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly. However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".by david_blitz1
- So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
* where tool replace with agent, map, AI
by NKosmatos - I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
by jampa - Counterpoint: the person who understands how do to a task without the tool often winds up being the more capable user of the tool.by jpitz
- This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
by RGS1811 - As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
by tangled