alt Hacker News> At first, my aunt wasn't buying that any AI was involved. [...] There was a long pause. "I was like 90% sure," she said, hesitating. "But that sounded more artificial."
There is a thing about many people. I don't remember the phenomenon's name, if it has one, but it goes like this:
Given enough time to reconsider options, people will be endlessly flip-flopping between them grabbing onto various features over and over in a loop.
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Given enough time to reconsider options, people will be endlessly flip-flopping between them grabbing onto various features over and over in a loop.
People will default to believing something is AI if there's no downside to that opinion. It's a defence mechanism. It stops them being 'caught out' or tricked into believing something that's not true.
As soon as there's a potential loss (e.g. missing out on getting rich, not helping a loved one) people will switch off that cynical critical thinking and just fall for AI-driven scams.
This is the downside of being a human being.
I have a systematic way of approaching this kind of situation, where you have to rapidly estimate a thing, commit to the estimate and are judged by the quality of your estimates in the long run; my approach is to first make a guess based off my gut, and then to pause and make a bet with myself, did I guess high or low? If my gut then says that my first gut instinct was too high or low, I adjust from there. I can't guess great the first time, but this two-stage guessing works a lot better for me.
I'm sure I'm not the first to use this technique, but I don't know what it's called.
Dissonance between what you instinctively believe and what you think the other person wants you to say.
Easy to replicate by asking someone something obvious, like the weather, and when they reply ask “are you sure?” - they won’t be so sure any more (believing it’s a trick question)
If I ask my mother if I’m real, she’ll have a pause because she has never had to entertain such a question, or the possibility her son over the phone is an impostor. Good way to push someone towards paranoia and psychosis.
Paradox of choice? It's more related to the number of choices and the impact on people's anxiety, but it's close.
Analysis Paralysis?
There's also another phenomenon which is that whatever the latest idea is, it must be the best. Many people do this mistake and even convince themselves of being right now because "they used to think like that" before.
So at each stage in the loop they are always super convinced of the position.
This phenomenon (or a closely related one?) is recognized and known as Kotov Sydnrome in the context of chess.
A summary, courtesy of chess dot com:
> The name of this "syndrome" comes from GM Alexander Kotov, author of the classic chess book Think Like a Grandmaster. In the book, Kotov described an incorrect yet very common calculation process that often leads players to select a suboptimal or bad move.
> According to Kotov, in positions where the lines are complex and there are numerous candidate moves and variations to calculate, it's easy to make a hasty move. A player in that situation might spend too much time going over two moves and all of their ramifications without finding a favorable ending position. In that process, the player is likely to go back and forth between the two different lines, always coming to the same unsatisfying conclusion—this wastes precious mental energy and time.
> After spending too much time evaluating the first two options, the player gives up the calculation due to time pressure or fatigue and plays a third move without calculating it. According to the author, that sort of move can cause tremendous blunders and cost the game.