Supposing you were imbued with the sum total of all human knowledge, would you find it hard to make a decision? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but one thing is for certain: our large language model (LLM) friends do find it difficult.
I’ve had an experience with this recently regarding a complex medical topic, which is that I was (presumably) born with an anatomical deviation in my eyes known as PLC or Physiologic Large Cup.
Something funny happens if you work in a particular field long enough, which is that you start to see everything that happens through the lens of the field you work in.
For example, my current company (Cerebrum) operates in the background screening space. So I’ve started to see everything through the lens of background checks.
Economic news is about companies, and news about companies is really news about the people in those companies, which is really news about who those people are hiring, which is really news about the background screening industry.
If you’ve ever experienced it or seen it in action, chemotherapy doesn’t seem very good. It is a brutal process. Oncologists practice the fine art of killing the cancer without entirely killing the patient. But the balancing act isn’t always successful.
Suppose the earth were semi-sentient, and had some vague billion-year-long evolutionary memory that suggested a looming apocalyptic danger.
Imagine that humans are a kind of inflammatory immune response, a form of self-administered chemotherapy: physics-wielding primates designed to avert the worst life-ending crisis (think: using nuclear weapons to divert a major asteroid impact), at the cost of a mass extinction, climate destabalization, and irreversible global pollution.
All knowledge is provisional, because it has to be encoded in language. This is a fragile arrangement.
Knowledge and knowing does not exist without some degree of circularity, because the mesh of language is built upon itself, like a sweater woven into multiple dimensions from a single line of string. This means that knowledge is foundationally dependent on the language or symbology that encodes it. And symbols are always lossy representations of the base reality that they reflect.