[CamperBob2]

I don't get it. First, how is it "better for you" to take the earring off, if "the wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family?"

Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers." So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.

Not seeing the problem here.

[Nevermark]

How would you feel with a procedure in which your brain was scooped out like ice cream from a bowl, and replaced with circuits that would do a better job of your life for you?

> So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.

Ok, the ice cream scooping happens slowly. At what point of atrophy, do you think it becomes easier to revert to what is left of it?

You still have free will, in the strictest sense. But you are increasingly dependent, so have lost optionality that no amount of will can replace.

Is your life story about what flows to you? Or about what challenges come to you, that you, yourself meet and overcome?

EDIT: But you are also right - given discipline - the right thing to do is always leverage every piece of good advice we can get. From bot or earring. By always (1) first coming up with our own best plan, so we have a basis to recognize and appreciate the insights in better ideas (2) get the best possible feedback on that plan, the good and the bad, and then (3) with what we learned from that, attempt a better plan, and repeat until getting somewhere better that either initial plan, for all the looping. Then still learn from any failure or success. And do not go down the slippery slope of delegating unimportant questions, like choices of ice cream flavors! This is how I get the most from my AI advisors. To work and train myself faster and harder!

[CamperBob2]

How would you feel with a procedure in which your brain was scooped out like ice cream from a bowl, and replaced with circuits that would do a better job of your life for you?

One way to answer that might be to argue the counterfactual. How would I feel if I were born in the state described in the story -- little or no gray matter, but endowed with the promise of a successful, enjoyable life, valued and respected by those around me -- and someone offered me an earring whose advice would give rise to uncertainty, self-doubt, and a constant, nagging awareness of my own ignorance and lost potential?

What incentive would I have to continue wearing that earring?

For that version of the story to make sense, you'd almost have to make it a cursed object that couldn't be removed once equipped.

[Dylan16807]

Well in that version you basically don't have the ability to make the decision at all. And it's unclear at that extreme if you're even enjoying things anymore.

[Sharlin]

How can you know it’s not the earring giving those testimonies? The story doesn’t say whether they were wearing the earring while being interviewed, but given that wearing it for a long time wastes away your neocortex and turns you into a flesh puppet, I don’t think long-term users are even able to speak on their own anymore.

OTOH people who are still themselves, in the early stages of the takeover, will certainly tell you of their own volition that the earring always seems to be right. Wearing it is presumably highly addictive.

[CamperBob2]

The story doesn’t say whether they were wearing the earring while being interviewed

Is there more than one of these earrings? The rest of the story makes it pretty clear that it's a singular artifact. If so, and given that the other wearers certainly weren't dead when being interviewed, the only explanation is that some people just decide it's not for them and take it off. Leaving out the qualification "living wearers" would have left some wiggle room, but that's not what the text says.

It's one of those stories that sounds profound only until you start to ask questions.

[wavemode]

It stands to reason that the people who took the earring off were less happy and made worse decisions than the people who kept it on for the rest of their lives.

So then ask yourself: why did they take it off? Pondering the implications of that question is the entire point of this short story.

[pseudalopex]

> It stands to reason that the people who took the earring off were less happy and made worse decisions than the people who kept it on for the rest of their lives.

No. It always tells you what will make you happiest. "Better for you if you take me off."

[ShinyLeftPad]

> how is it "better for you" to take the earring off, if "the wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family?"

I think it's pretty obvious since you read until the end you know in the second one there's quickly no "you" remaining ;)

It's like the terrifying answer to Star Trek teleporter paradox. On the surface it's the same guy. He walks like Bob and talks like Bob and is more successful thanks to the power of instant travel! But YOU are dead after the first teleportation.

[Dylan16807]

Well in the teleporter example you still have a Bob. With the earring it's probably not processing Bob's mind in there at all, which makes it way worse.

[ShinyLeftPad]

Earring supposedly directs wearer to what's good for them so supposedly it did processing at first...

[Dylan16807]

It's processing something, but probably not running a whole Bob in there.

[ShinyLeftPad]

Sure. But the key part is the same, you die and something else walks instead...

[Dylan16807]

Eh. Like arguably you die when you sleep. It's way better to have an ultra accurate copy than to have a totally different thing half-pretend to be Bob/you.

[strogonoff]

An exclusive choice between maintaining free will and agency vs. achieving some definition of “success” makes for a good story. You’d think the choice would be blindingly obvious, and yet turns out it isn’t (or to some it is blindingly obvious in the opposite direction).

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

The problem is not that it limits the wearer's free will. On the contrary, it allows the wearer to exercise it way too effectively on the premise that the wearer already knows exactly who he is and what he needs.

[Erem]

Because, if you don't take it off, "you" will cease to exist and instead gradually become the rich and much beloved appendage of an earring.

The entire story is about the definition of self imho.

[lelanthran]

> Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers."

You are hilariously misreading that :-)

"First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers"

Who says that they testified after taking the earring off? My reading (done with my non-atrophied brain, used to reading human prose not LLM-prose) was clear on the very first go: Those who testified did so while wearing the earring, then they died but their testimony was already recorded.

> Not seeing the problem here.

As you've made clear in many many of your posts on HN, you are all-in on LLMs and appear to use them much more than even the average HN user. Maybe start considering that you are losing comprehension with regard to human-written prose?