Ok now do NYT columnists
already this has tags in the notes like “#anti ai” but... this is just real life with almost everything. this is like grifter 101 please don’t exceptionalize needing to be critical of chatgpt.
This is literally how job interviews work, by the way, and then everyone is surprised the super-duper confident guy is also an incompetent moron.
This worked on Trump voters, with the added selling point that he's a piece of shit that gave them permission to be pieces of shit.
Talking to experts when I was young used to drive me nuts because I would say something self-evidently straightforward, and they would say, "Well, it's not actually as simple as that..."
And then I got older and learned things on the way, and found people asking me questions that were straightforward, but the equivalent of "Why isn't it obvious to everyone that there is only one right way of doing the thing...?" and I would reply, "Well, it's not as simple as that..." and watch them decide that I probably didn't know what I was talking about.
I spent the first half of my life in a special nook of academia that truly ruined ruined me for the rest of the world. Now academia has its flaws (that's why I left) - but it did manage to instill in me a deep *belief* that expertise doesn't usually look like certainty. Intelligence doesn't just look like a quick quip. Leadership doesn't look like an order barked. All of those qualities look something more like this: 'ahhh interesting ha hm hah well that's not really my field but let's sit down and have a thinkie [lugs out five dusty tomes from under desk and pulls up a search bar in an academic journal]'. Essentially, I learned that an expert is someone who gets *excited* rather than afraid at the prospect of having the bounds of their expertise challenged - someone who will gleefully take the bait to have a deeper, more complex discussion over the low-hanging fruit of the sound-bite answer. I learned that that knowledge is as much about knowing what you don't know as it is about knowing what you know, and that confidence looks like having the self-assurance to admit that without getting ruffled.
In academic circles, i learned to read as confident, assertive, and intelligent because i mimicked the above behavior, which i admired. Often i did feel stupid about not knowing something, but i trained myself to state my ignorance with a smile - because that's what confidence looked like. That's what expertise looked like. Even when I wanted to, I never covered up the gaps in my knowledge or showed fear at the prospect of being wrong. I asked questions back at questions and reached for the more complex truth. This was the environment in which I learned how to command respect. Outside of the ivory tower, it has been a perpetual shock to learn that admitting uncertainty - or simply just stopping to think - reads as weakness, ignorance, lack of confidence, or even submission. People take it as a signal that they can disrespect you. I was taught it all absolutely backwards. To this day there's nothing that infuriates me more than being taken for a pushover because i wear confidence like an academic, not a businessman. But the conditioning is bone-deep, and I'm not about to try and change it.
