EbolaFred t1_j9yrqbv wrote on February 25, 2023 at 3:42 PM

Reply to comment by Lawjarp2 in People lack imagination and it’s really bothering me by thecoffeejesus

I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

Maybe 10% of the people I interact with are free to let their thoughts wander and generate new ideas. The rest seem to be running an NPC script. I can literally predict their full sentences before they say them with pretty decent accuracy.

Now of course I don't know what they are really thinking. They may have some kind of a safe social filter they've developed to make themselves appear normal and socially acceptable - maybe they've had some bad experiences where they've shared their real thoughts and rocked the boat too much, so they shut that part down. But it's something to think about, now that we have access to recent LLMs and can experience how well next word prediction can work.

WarAndGeese t1_j9yvi55 wrote on February 25, 2023 at 4:08 PM

They are just focussed on different aspects of their life than you are. You have gone through and seen the same conversations over and over, you have seen the common responses. It's like playing a video game and knowing the 'meta' game. Hence when you go and tell someone something, and they are hearing about it for the first or second or third time, their response will probably be one of the popular responses that you already know about.

That said they're people just like you. It's not productive for you to look down on them or for them to look down on you, they have different priorities at the moment and hence they are somewhere else mentally.

That said, us here can agree and say that their priorities are wrong maybe, but it's not some fundamental divide between people.

WarAndGeese t1_j9yvks9 wrote on February 25, 2023 at 4:09 PM

Maybe our priorities are maybe closer to what we should be doing but our priorities are also very flawed.

SlowCrates t1_ja40155 wrote on February 26, 2023 at 5:59 PM

Oh god, I don't know. There are certain people whose predictability and unoriginality are so grating on me that it makes me seriously wonder if I have a severe personality disorder. (I don't as far as my therapist believes).

They're everywhere, but in varying degrees. Some are aware they're doing it, and some aren't. There are people who are completely content having nothing but bullshit fill their minds, who only listen to the radio, wear brand-name clothing with big, easily identifiable logos in the middle of the chest, whose political opinion is copy and pasted from those around them.