> I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.
Exactly. That phrase "meeting people where they're at" comes to mind. Less as a slogan and more as an pedagogical principle. It's not enough to deliver information, it's important to consider how people make sense of the world in the first place.
Like you pointed out, the analogy to divination isn't meant to mystify the tech. It's meant to describe how, to many people, this interface feels. And when people interact with a system in a way that feels like consulting an oracle, we can't dismiss that as ignorance. We have to understand it as a real feature of how people relate to symbolic systems. That includes search engines, card catalogs, and yes, LLMs.
This is one of the densest concentrations of AI-literate minds on the internet. That's exactly why I think it's worth introducing frames from outside the dominant paradigm: anthropology, semiotics, sociology. It's not to be sill or weird, but to illuminate things engineers might otherwise take for granted. It's easy to forget how much unspoken cultural infrastructure supports what we call "information retrieval."
If a few comments dismiss that perspective as silly or unscientific, I don't take it personally. If anything, it reassures me I'm tapping into something unfamiliar but worth sharing and worth having deep discussion on.
Thanks again for engaging in good faith. That's the kind of exchange that makes this place valuable.
> I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.
Exactly. That phrase "meeting people where they're at" comes to mind. Less as a slogan and more as an pedagogical principle. It's not enough to deliver information, it's important to consider how people make sense of the world in the first place.
Like you pointed out, the analogy to divination isn't meant to mystify the tech. It's meant to describe how, to many people, this interface feels. And when people interact with a system in a way that feels like consulting an oracle, we can't dismiss that as ignorance. We have to understand it as a real feature of how people relate to symbolic systems. That includes search engines, card catalogs, and yes, LLMs.
This is one of the densest concentrations of AI-literate minds on the internet. That's exactly why I think it's worth introducing frames from outside the dominant paradigm: anthropology, semiotics, sociology. It's not to be sill or weird, but to illuminate things engineers might otherwise take for granted. It's easy to forget how much unspoken cultural infrastructure supports what we call "information retrieval."
If a few comments dismiss that perspective as silly or unscientific, I don't take it personally. If anything, it reassures me I'm tapping into something unfamiliar but worth sharing and worth having deep discussion on.
Thanks again for engaging in good faith. That's the kind of exchange that makes this place valuable.