[wewtyflakes]

This seems like a stretch. Another example may be, "If I am throwing a party, should I ask people that I do not invite, what they want?". Sure you could say that they could approximate the wants of the people who _are_ going, but why not just ask the people who are going, directly? It's just noise, otherwise.

[9rx]

> why not just ask the people who are going, directly?

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

You don't poll people to find out what they want. You poll people to gather their ideas. Ideas that you can then leverage to deliver what your intended audience wants, even when they didn't know that they wanted it!

If we assume this party you are throwing has 10 guests, you think you're going to get all the best ideas from those 10 specific people and nothing from the hundreds of people you could have asked? Maybe if you're throwing a party for professional party planners, but otherwise...

[wewtyflakes]

I think asking 10 people instead of 8 billion people is a more reasonable way to discover the preferences of those 10 people. That is not to say there is not interesting information at the margin, but it is the margin.

[9rx]

Why not ask the 10 people and 8 billion other people? The 10 people might have good ideas too, but no need to rely on them entirely. Most especially when you are OpenAI and can throw your language models at finding the useful information found in those 8 billion responses.

The artificial divide you are trying to create is unnecessary and not a reflection of the real world. Most people will gather input from as far as wide as they can. They might not be able to operate at anything close to OpenAI scale, but even Average Joe will turn to random strangers (e.g. on Facebook or Reddit) to get party ideas.

[wewtyflakes]

Because these populations are orders of magnitude apart in size, intent, and investment; and trying to find the diamond in the rough for a 10-person survey is a lot easier than an 8-billion person survey. How about if you own a burger joint in Kansas and you are being told you need to send out a survey to people in Peru, because there might be some good insight there? Sure, maybe there is, but this is not helpful advice.

[9rx]

Why wouldn't it be helpful? I am almost certainly going to get better ideas from people introducing me to Peruvian flavours than a bunch of "I like what is on the Big Mac" responses.

Sure, one of my customers in Kansas might have a brilliant idea that I've never considered, but much more likely I'll already be familiar with anything they can dream up.

1. They are going to come from much the same background as I.

2. They are apt to be home cooks at best, while a burger joint is expected to elevate.

Topping a burger is an implementation detail. Within reason, the customer doesn't really care about what is on the burger as long as it tastes good. In a similar vein, are you going to ask the expected users of your new cat meme app which programming language you should use?

[wewtyflakes]

I think we are going in circles. At the end of the day, I do not think it is reasonable to expect everyone to survey everyone, and take all of that information in and weight it equally; YMMV.