Absolutely, closes the book this sort of stuff doesn't happen in real life.
Want to know a dirty secret?
Nobody knows what they're doing.
Some think they do - but don't. (idiots)
Some know they don't - but act like they do. (cons)
And some know they don't - and are honest about it. (children)
Pick your poison, but we all suck in different ways - and usually in a different way based on our background.
Business people who are the best in the world tend to be cons.
Technical people who are the best tend to be children.
You get a culture clash between these two, and it is especially bad when you see someone from one background operate in the opposing domain using their background's cultural norm. So when Ilya runs business like a child. Or when Elon hops on an internal call with the twitter engineering team plus geohot and starts trying to confidently tell them about problems with a system that he knows nothing about.
Sure makes for great entertainment though!
There is a famous quote from the 1600s:
"An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur"
"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
The context is that the son was preparing to participate in high level diplomacy and worried about being out of his league, and the quote is from his father, an elder statesman.
We like to feel that we as a species are still in control. That yes, we are gutting and destroying natural earth, complicit with modern slavery and war, and that's all terrible and we should do our best to stop it. BUT - at the very least, those bastards at the top know what they're doing when it comes to making money, so at least we'll have a stellar economy and rapid technological advancement, despite all that.
The painful truth here being that no, there's no cunning. There's no brutal optimization. Any value created and technological progress made is mostly incidental, mostly down to people at the bottom working hard just to survive, and a few good ideas here and there. The ones at the top are mostly just lucky and along for the ride, just as bumbling and lost as the rest of us when it comes to global happenings or even just successfully interacting with others.
> Some think they do - but don't. (idiots)
Pioneers
> Some know they don't - but act like they do. (cons)
The "Grease"
> And some know they don't - and are honest about it. (children)
Dreamers
To finish out your square, I think the best extrapolation would fit a "Home Team" that maintains the energy needed by the other three to do their thing :)
There are absolutely people who know what they are doing.
I am sure there are. But few and far between. And rarely are they in positions of power in my experience.
Knowing what you are doing: accurate mental model
The author here is talking about mindset and confidence - not "understanding" persay. Source:
> For me, it was extremely humbling to work together with far more competent engineers at Apple.
Having a mindset that "some people are way more competent than me" is talking about humility and growth mindsets - different concept than mental models. I fully agree with the author here - a growth mindset is useful! But that's a different thing from saying that some people actually have accurate mental models of the important complex systems underpinning the world.
This is not an original point by me - I've seen multiple people make similar comments on here over the weekend - but these are the people who think they are best qualified to prevent an artificial superintelligence from destroying humanity, and they can't even coordinate the actions of a few intelligent humans.
do they believe that?
they happen to be the ones who can pull the brakes in order to allow someone on earth the chance to prevent it.
if they don't pull the brakes and if humankind is unlucky that superintelligence emerges quickly, then it doesn't matter whether or not anyone on earth can figure out alignment, nobody has the chance to try.
I just tried, and GPT-4 gave me a professional and neutrally worded press release like you pointed out.
More realistically, this is why you have highly paid PR consultants. Right now, every tweet and statement should go through one.
That doesn't look like it's happening. What's next?
"I'm sorry you feel you need an apology from me"?
Perhaps they did but it was hallucinating at the time? /s?
If nothing else I’m glad to be above to witness this absurdity live.
This is the sort of thing where if it were a subplot in a book I’d say the writing is bad.
Ironically they would’ve had a better outcome if they just asked GPT-4 and followed its advice.