The Candid Naivety of Geeks

> In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate.

> The game changes when we realize that life is not a single dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our opponent defects twice

> The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"

> And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.

> Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.)

Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is going to change anything?

Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz. Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in, for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it, because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would commit to long-term memory.

No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds like something between bad impulse control and idiocy.

I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to convince.

I worked on on-device speech at Google, both frontend and backend. Unless there was a secret cabal mirror team that did all the evil stuff and made us think we were writing the code that was shipping, it doesn't come close to describing how things actually were worked through internally.

Most trivially, and narrowly, Most Evil Amazon would be just as happy with a transcript of what you said that was recognized locally. There's 0 reason they need the audio. I'd also hazard a guess they're not streaming audio to the server, no one would create a hotword detector that would rely on that, due to the latency and bandwidth demand alone.