I'm reading "More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity" and one point author Adam Becker brings up is that techbros like to deflect discussions into big, insoluble questions -- what can we do to prevent rogue AIs from destroying humanity, biological immortality, are we not obligated now to consider how our decisions could affect the development of trillions of far-future human beings, are we living in a simulation? -- rather than tackling immediate real-world implications of AI, robotic workers, bitcoin-mining, etc.
Which then spins off a bigthink ecosystem of conferences, classes, books, and non-profits...
This is always something that's a beast to deal with because it's not intrinsically bad, or not bad. It's just neutral. When we talk about things like thinking styles, we tend to talk in absolute fashion. This style is bad or good, etc. This is a very poor way of doing that though, instead it's much more applied in context. For example, do 2 thinking styles come to the same correct conclusion, with the only difference one reaches the conclusion faster or with more understanding? The actual way to frame this is not that either or is bad, rather, one is only "good" subjectively in the sense of being faster or coming to a more refined conclusion. If we frame this in absolutist terms, we may frame Bob with the "bad" style, but also miss out on use cases where *his* thinking style actually makes more sense.
I'm not the biggest fan of how simple and linear it's framed, but Kahnemans System 1 vs System 2 thinking is a good short specific example of this. Neither is bad! Both have pros and cons, where the cons respectively express/overexpress is when applied to situations it is not efficient in. For example, Systems 2 thinking can be disruptive to casual social interactions, but is better for strategic business decision making. On the flop, System 1 is poor for strategic business decision making, but far more feasible for casual social interactions.
Our life experiences up till X point and surrounding environmental factors (societal, cultural, political, etc) all cumulatively result in what your thinking style is - at this point it is "conditioned". Basically a part of yourself.
Every style is unique in specifics but the overall dynamics aren't really, and summarily each only discusses their own largely through positive frames. BigThink ecosystem of conferences, classes, books, and nonprofits? You can find that positively framed for every thinking, behavioral, or etc style you can discern.
Then add in, say, the complex layer of discussion here. A sad reality is, without the techbros doing all that extra stuff, we likely wouldn't have quite a significant amount of the tech we have available today. Not only are these people organically thinking like that, they are also in roles that require them to think that way. There's multiple factors that condition and reinforce that being the like, only type those audiences apply.
Not only do they experience it works, if you are managing a large scale business, those types of thinking
are important. The issue we see is usually instead (self-)management of the styles as a cognitive skill.
We have a term for leaders that focus too much on that tactical/lower/etc level, it's called micro-managing, most of us hate it and it's usually not very beneficial. Actual top leaders like that
should be thinking from that big picture frame. Although the failure we see there is either A) they do not account for those lower level skills, which creates failures at that level or B) they do not onboard someone to account for their gap here in an administrative sense.
