Social Cache Busting

(autodidacts.io)

30 points | by surprisetalk 3 days ago

5 comments

  • mrtksn 1 minute ago
    Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.

    I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice.

  • hypfer 2 hours ago
    Terminology is a bit weird.

    I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).

    Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.

    Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.

    Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.

    Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.

  • anandbaburajan 52 minutes ago
    > It lets the person you are talking to have novel, original thoughts, rather than repeating the thoughts they’ve had before.

    But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.

  • leoncos 1 hour ago
    Some politicians are impeccable; if you ask them thorny questions like scandals, they always throw out a new question to change the topic.
    • collabs 43 minutes ago
      I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.
  • ai_fry_ur_brain 35 minutes ago
    I have section in my notes app of things people repeat, most commonly its executives hitting the cache they're all repeating each other.