@lokeloski Gell-Mann Amnesia.

@AdrianRiskin @lokeloski or more generally the egocentric bias. Veritasium has a nice video on this: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I?si=ZV6CuklywzLekwHd

@AdrianRiskin @lokeloski It's one of the reasons that, when pointing out that I do not like Generative LLMs for the work they output, I do emphasize that it's not just *my* programming expertise that I feel this for.

Like, I feel the same way for books; if you wrote it with an LLM, and we can see because a prompt made it into the printed version, that tells me that you did not read what you claimed to have "Wrote" with an LLM - why should I read it then, when I know it can do the same thing it can do for math, or coding, or images?

@lokeloski Very well put. To me, this is similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where for subjects we have deep knowlege about, we see all the flaws in media reports, but tend to assume that for all other subjects, the media reports are basically fine. @davidgerard

@lokeloski Gen AI can replace incompetent people. Well, it will be incompetent, too, but often somewhat better.

Same with self-driving cars. Self-driving cars replacing incompetent drivers and driving somewhat better than them is good enough to improve overall traffic safety.

We like to compare AI with the best people out there — we made the same mistake with chess players and go players and only accepted AI superiority when AI was able to beat the world champion; but it was playing better than average a decade before.

Current Gen AI is certainly worse than the best. But we don't have that many best people out there. We have a lot of stupid, uneducated people. And we have them in positions of power where they never should have been promoted to, and they do spectacularly wrong things there.

We are constantly overestimating human intelligence, too. Not just Gen AI intelligence.

@lokeloski@mastodon.social I just shared this at work.
With some of the people pushing for AI integration everywhere.

@lokeloski or programmers asking LLMs to generate code for them, because they cannot code

@lokeloski I call that Mount Stupid

@geeeero @lokeloski important to note the Gell-Mann effect is made up trash. It's literally something Crichton said once. So imagine how cognitive psychologists feel about it.

@lokeloski Fortunately for AI pushers, most people are ignorant about most things. Optimistically, the Inverse 80/20 rule applies.

@lokeloski I’ve seen this attitude even in some highly skilled people.

The idea that what they’re doing is obviously complex and requires deep knowledge and skills, but work that others are doing is obviously trivial. Very surprising.

It’s not uncommon for undergraduates to assume some field is easy, because the introductory course they had on it was, but for accomplished professors to have similar ideas about fields outside of their expertise? Why? Is there a psychologist in the house?

@lokeloski An extra step to this I saw elsewhere- "People think it can do things except the things they personally are competent to do. Which is why the C Suite thinks it can do everything"

@lokeloski@mastodon.social Why do I always find it at best questionable for any field I look at? Like, "yeah that kind of feels like that's maybe decent, but I'd have to check out to see if it's actually stupid..." Ah well, because it's always stupid when I have the slightest bit of a clue.

@lokeloski The strange thing about AI is that it generates great answers to everything I don't know much about, yet in my field of expertise it seems to be incredibly dumb.

@DenOfEarth @lokeloski

@distractal @lokeloski we need to call CEO-level jobs unskilled labor for precisely the reasons you just listed.

@lokeloski my biggest takeaway from this is that YOU CAN BE A COMICS PROFESSOR?!?!!?!?