Would you believe that generative AI neutralizes the Dunning-Kruger effect? That’s right: thanks to LLMs, under-competent people no longer need worry that they suffer from disproportionate delusions of mastery. Wow!
That’s because AI evens the proportions. A recent study suggests that most people who rely on it start wildly overestimating their proficiency before long, including and especially those who have high baseline competence. AI levels the playing field on hubris, not ability.
This holds up in my online life, where I’ve noticed a dramatic recent uptick in grandiose self-belief. A fair amount of it’s coming from people I never thought would go full bippity boppity boo on the magical thinking—you know, people I suspect still have yard signs that say “in this house, we believe in science.” And I don’t think all of them are even getting their delulu directly from LLMs. I suspect this is more of a cholera situation: robot poop in the town well plopped into a soup of algorithms and steaming hot stress, resulting in a fulminant outbreak now diarrheal for us all.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Lord, let me count the examples:
People’s ubiquitous—and wildly unearned—certainty that Mitch McConnell is dead. All anyone actually knows (for now) is that a man and wife famous for a lifetime of sus behavior are once again acting quite sus.
The full-bore horror of the Lindsay Clancy trial discourse: on the one hand, those “give that bitch the death penalty” takes from self-righteous loudmouths who know nothing about postpartum psychosis; on the other, the escalating lunacy about the husband. In the space of two weeks, my feed has gone from “why did Patrick leave Lindsay alone with the kids” (which is fair) to “that guy remarried too fast, I bet he was having an affair” to “he was definitely having an affair” to “there’s no chance he wasn’t abusing Lindsay while having his affair” to—good God—whatever this is:
This is far from the only post I’ve seen like this. He strangled her. Those neck cuts actually look like strangle cuts to me. He set up speakers and mumbled things into them to convince her she was “hearing voices.” What breathtaking gall.
The alacrity with which many of us have diagnosed not just celebrities’ various eating disorders but when they’re going to die. (Concern is understandable. Declaring strangers terminal in the comments “as a physician” is insane.)
Ditto when he’s going to die. (Would that you were correct, Nostradamus.)
The viral video of those people making out in Central Park. I am horrified at the level of surveillance and punishment that Gen Z in particular seems to embrace in the name of moral vigilantism, but I suppose we older people are the ones who made them that way, by raising them to expect nonstop nonconsensual filming from birth.
The proliferation of grandiose queries in my inbox. It wasn’t like I never got “my Theory of Everything exceeds the combined genius of Newton and Einstein”-style submissions prior to now, but I do feel I’m getting a lot more of them.
The entire Botox discourse.
I’m an Emma Woodhouse Type who’s always loved a little armchair personality-disorder diagnosis and increasingly has to check her impulse to label strangers Psychotic with a capital P. (Shout out to the follower who recently pointed out that I shouldn’t say that, because I’m not a clinician. They were correct.) And you have no idea how much I want to continue yelling at you about Botox right now.
Yes, and: that I can feel my own hubris rising only makes me more concerned about the overall epidemic, especially as it applies to book publishing. Because it’s just one more sign that this contamination of unearned righteousness is everywhere now, infecting gatekeepers and veterans no less than poseurs and wannabes. LLM-dependent or not, people everywhere seem less and less bothered to remember what we don’t know these days, and I find that profoundly unsettling. Pride cometh before the fall, you know—and people whose identity is bound up in their genius tend to fall especially hard, flailing in denial and harming themselves and others on the way down.
I beg you—I beg us all—to be more cognizant of our own limits before we continue mistaking hubris for expertise, setting terrible precedents as we set ourselves up to fall harder in the long run.
Let’s start close to home:
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