[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.