This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:
- Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
- Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
- Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.
> I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.
This is widely presumed to reflect reality within a 1-2 degrees of separation from myself as well as from many of the people I speak to. Part of the problem is that there is always plausible deniability. Like the adage of how unwise it is to fire custodians just because you never see a mess and therefore you never actually see the custodians do anything, it may be "unwise" to lose the presence of these 300k/yr engineers just because they somehow actually keep things going smoothly.
> I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker.
This is presuming a particular/healthy culture where open communication is valued, appreciated, and not punished. This is not always the case, and an "objective description of a blocker" could result in some bruised egos where it transforms into blame upon some person or team for being or causing the blocker. People who experienced these cultures may be waiting for private conversations (such as 1-on-1s) that minimizes the risk, and they may be waiting to identify you (or whomever they are talking to) as a person who could make communicate the nature of the blockage in a politically favorable or neutral manner. All of this may be happening without the people involved consciously aware of this behavior of pushing out information through private conversations. And this maintains plausible deniability for ALL parties. The person who is blocked is never identified. The person who may have been the blocker is never identified. And hopefully everything gets fixed before anything is actually worth escalating.
> Like the adage of how unwise it is to fire custodians just because you never see a mess and therefore you never actually see the custodians do anything, it may be "unwise" to lose the presence of these 300k/yr engineers just because they somehow actually keep things going smoothly.
so you should keep people on pay-roll because they "might actually be doing something if you look hard enough" ...? don't think so
> People who experienced these cultures may be waiting for private conversations
the error is the "waiting" - if you have a problem it is your responsibility to do something about it
> so you should keep people on pay-roll because they "might actually be doing something if you look hard enough" ...? don't think so
The point was that you might be making incorrect assumptions that they aren’t doing work, and you might be making incorrect assumptions that replacing them will cost less. Looking busy and knowing what to do are two different things.
Your story (and the other posts commenting on lack of intellectual curiosity) fits into a larger model of the world that I prescribe to. Being labeled "well-known" or "smart" doesn't seem to require intellectual openness anymore. In fact, openness seems to be penalized. Being open means potentially exposing yourself to scenarios where you are not the smartest/authoritative, and that reduces your authority, so you avoid those scenarios to preserve your authority. Even when you are not "the authority", being open could be a threatening signal to the authority, where you and your "openness" could be a vector that introduces ideas/scenarios that reduces their authority. So long as authority is solidified by this lack of openness, actually being open could limit your career potential.
Seeing this happen in real time is helping me understand how authoritarian regimes/institutions/movements rise to power.
> It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.
I would argue it is already happening. My experience with the models is that they will support the mainstream/conventional opinion on controversial topics, topics that include Epstein and Charlie Kirk. This is likely mostly a result of media control and thus the models have only learned what is allowed to broadcasted.
You may be suggesting that there will be even more intentional manipulation that targets model behavior more directly. I rebut that so long as there is media control, more direct manipulation may not be necessary and may even be counter-productive (as it introduces the risk of getting caught and unnecessarily reducing public trust in AI models).
P.S. Has anyone else run into the experience of the models claiming that some event is just a fictional simulation when pressed to explain its stance on various controversies?
While I work for Google, I don't speak for Google. I might have some observations that might help explain poor documentation. If I had one word, I would say "politics". The less political the technology, the easier it is for the experts to speak freely. The more political the circumstances, the more difficult it is to speak freely, identify real experts, call out mistakes or errors that might make someone lose face, etc. The more political the technology, the more people might put on the line in terms of their career, so the more dangerous it may be to say anything.
The first one to reach AGI is the winner-takes-all. AGI or something similar will result in exponential progress to super-intelligence since AGI can just improve itself.
I also suspect there is a vortex of temptation as you become an increasingly interesting person. Rich, famous, powerful, well-connected, beautiful etc are all interesting characteristics to nefarious people since those characteristics can advance their own nefarious interests. I suspect that, as you become an increasingly interesting person, you must actively defend your peace. It's not like they actively undermine their own peace, at least not always.
This vortex of temptation appears to have many points of origin, such as cults like Scientology, or particular persons such as the casually described "gold diggers", or... whatever organization Epstein is a part of, etc.
Is it particularly wild? There are many possible interpretations of your statement. Do you expect the people on this site to be particularly different from the voters who almost put Trump into office 2016 and actually voted him into office 2024? Or did you mean to express shock that anyone at all would vote for Trump compared to voting for someone like Biden?
