Totally agreed. What most people are not realizing is that bullshit is way more powerful than we could have ever imagined. (I’m also suspecting that humans, including me, bullshit our way through daily life more than we realize.)

So-called AI “reasoning” essentially works by having the AI produce bullshit, and then read over that bullshit and check how reasonable it sounds (of course, “checking how reasonable it sounds” is also bullshit, but it’s at least systematic bullshit.) This can produce actually very useful results. Obviously, you need to know when is a good time to use AI and when isn’t, which most people still don’t have a good feel for.

If this sounds absurd, consider how people can do very well in exams on subjects they know nothing about by bullshitting. An LLM can do that, and ontop of that also has been trained on tons more material than any human. So it’s more capable of bullshitting than any human ever could be.

But still people think it’s useless because “it doesn’t understand.”