7 ms·

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

Suzuran 8mo ago
In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.
- nathanaldensr 8mo ago
  The high-trust Boomer brain cannot comprehend the actual low-trust society of grifters in which we live.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pluralmonad 8mo ago
    I don't agree with this blanket statement. The internet is low trust for lots of reasons, but regular (read small, proximal/spatiotemporally constrained) communities still exist and are not grifters all the way down. Acknowledging that distant strangers are not trustworthy in the traditional sense seems reasonable, but is categorically different than addressing natural social groups (small and local).
    - OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
      Yes, and most young Americans are locked out of those small, high-trust suburbs due to high housing prices. So instead they get to experience the magic of low-trust America first-hand, hence the disconnect between the young and the boomers.
      - ryandrake 8mo ago
        Exactly. Sadly, low-trust America has become the default where most people live. There are still nice, small-town, local shopping, suburban high-trust enclaves here and there, but as soon as you go online or deal with a business with more than a handful of locations, you're back in the low-trust grifting zone.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  The Gervais Principle framework calls this type of person a Clueless. They sit in middle management as a buffer between the Sociopaths who run the world, and the Losers who know the world sucks but would just like to get their paycheck and go home. I'm surprised to hear this actually play out — the Gervais Principle doesn't seem very empirical.
TeMPOraL 8mo ago
This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life. So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it. The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect. So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule. -- [0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit. [1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better. [2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!
- miki123211 8mo ago
  > [1] Cybersecurity is also an exception here. "men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred. If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.
  - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
    That's a fair point, and I suppose it is a major reason cybersecurity looks the way it does. The Internet as it is ignores the jurisdictional borders. But I still think cybersec is going overboard with controls, constraining use cases where international cybercrime is not a major factor in the threat model.
- 8mo ago
johnnyanmac 8mo ago
Just doesn't understand the scale of money. Maybe a million dollar company needs to be compliant. A billion dollar company can start to ward off any loopholes with lawsuits instead of compliance. A trillion dollar company will simply change the law and fight governments over the law to begin with, rather than worrying about compliance.

In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.

nathanaldensr 8mo ago
The high-trust Boomer brain cannot comprehend the actual low-trust society of grifters in which we live.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- pluralmonad 8mo ago
  I don't agree with this blanket statement. The internet is low trust for lots of reasons, but regular (read small, proximal/spatiotemporally constrained) communities still exist and are not grifters all the way down. Acknowledging that distant strangers are not trustworthy in the traditional sense seems reasonable, but is categorically different than addressing natural social groups (small and local).
  - OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
    Yes, and most young Americans are locked out of those small, high-trust suburbs due to high housing prices. So instead they get to experience the magic of low-trust America first-hand, hence the disconnect between the young and the boomers.
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      Exactly. Sadly, low-trust America has become the default where most people live. There are still nice, small-town, local shopping, suburban high-trust enclaves here and there, but as soon as you go online or deal with a business with more than a handful of locations, you're back in the low-trust grifting zone.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
direwolf20 8mo ago
The Gervais Principle framework calls this type of person a Clueless. They sit in middle management as a buffer between the Sociopaths who run the world, and the Losers who know the world sucks but would just like to get their paycheck and go home. I'm surprised to hear this actually play out — the Gervais Principle doesn't seem very empirical.

TeMPOraL 8mo ago

This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life. So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it. The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect. So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule. -- [0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit. [1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better. [2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!

miki123211 8mo ago
> [1] Cybersecurity is also an exception here. "men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred. If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.
- TeMPOraL 8mo ago
  That's a fair point, and I suppose it is a major reason cybersecurity looks the way it does. The Internet as it is ignores the jurisdictional borders. But I still think cybersec is going overboard with controls, constraining use cases where international cybercrime is not a major factor in the threat model.
8mo ago

johnnyanmac 8mo ago

Just doesn't understand the scale of money. Maybe a million dollar company needs to be compliant. A billion dollar company can start to ward off any loopholes with lawsuits instead of compliance. A trillion dollar company will simply change the law and fight governments over the law to begin with, rather than worrying about compliance.