[paulryanrogers]

> ...I don’t think religion is an inherently bad thing either.

Agree to disagree. Regardless I don't think their points are about religion. It seems like they're just complaining about memic and ritualistic behavior that happens on phones. Using the religion label feels more meant for click bait than as a fitting metaphor.

[trollbridge]

People who study religion often call this “folk religion” - ritualistic, and viewing the world as some giant mystery with all kinds of mysterious forces in charge.

Which is how many people approach technology, and virtually all of us approach LLMs.

[bee_rider]

Folk religion has always felt pretty sensible to me—we basically have build-in hardware acceleration to handle social situations, so we anthropomorphize the forces of nature and use that hardware to make predictions about the weather. It is just a heuristic (often wrong) and sometimes it can lead to wasteful actions as a result, like sacrificing a goat before you set out in a journey. But it can be good to start a journey with a meal anyway, if the gods are happy with the hard-to-cook parts this could be a win-win.

We just shouldn’t try to apply these gods outside their wheelhouses.