> “…we assume the cooperative principle holds […] that the question is sincere and that there must be some plausible reason for walking.”
Yes. And. Some problems have irrelevant data which should be ignored.
The walk choice is irrelevant in the context. It needs to be simplified, as with a maths problem. That has nothing to do with human nature, but rather prior mistake in reasoning.
Back in my undergrad years c1994 a professor brought a new assignment to our special topics course in design thinking. It was a report from a NY telecommunications firm.
I can’t recall the details. Only that I “predicted” a dark vision of your refrigerator competing in a foods market to buy your staple products at the best price whenever your stock became low. And then, of course it all goes awry when you end up with 6 cases of milk.
I tried searching for some hint of the telecom project that was the start of our class assignment. No luck. But I did find this viddy on YouTube with a great intro with interviews of the “person on the street”.
A possible catalyst might have been the 1993 AT&T "You Will" Ad Campaign. It was very prescient but also the joke is that the commercials ended with "and the company that will bring it to you will be AT&T", which did not pan out in the ways that ad campaign thought.
"toxic"? I don't think HN is more toxic than anywhere else on the net. Less so even. People may share a thought that is poorly considered, and, if another person takes objection, get called out for it. And most remonstrations are at the civil level--polite with an explanation of the objection.
That said, consuming the news and social media at this time does raise my hackles. Rage inducing, even. "God" help us all.
> I don't think HN is more toxic than anywhere else
It is supposed to be less toxic, enabling interesting discussions about tech, where people can exchange ideas and learn something. There are enough other places for politics.
There should be more writing and discussion in this area for several reasons. Simplest reason because we're curious about how others do this. But also because it's an interesting topic, IMHO, because layers of abstraction--code designed to run other code--can be difficult to talk about, because the referents get messy. How do you rhetorically step through layers of abstraction?
> “It is fascinating to observe the concept of protest...just one example of the general case of a metric ceasing to be useful once it is recognize as a metric.”
And why not? We humans do things like this all the time. We act with powerful false beliefs. Misunderstand a situation or simply just the meaning of a word, and then build our world-view and lives around those false beliefs. Train your model on this, and replicate in those false beliefs.
> "An AI agent ... published a personalized hit piece about me ...raises serious concerns about..."
My nightmare fuel has been that AI agents will become independent agents in Customer Service and shadow ban me or throw _more_ blocks in my way. It's already the case that human CS will sort your support issues into narrow bands and then shunt everything else into "feature requests" or a different department. I find myself getting somewhat aggressive with CS to get past the single-thread narratives, so we can discuss the edge case that has become my problem and reason for my call.
But AI agents attacking me. That's a new fear unlocked.
This book is a fun popular science page turner.
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