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Sorry for the late reply. Been busy, but circling back to this has been on my todo list.
I mentioned Scott Adams because before LLMs were even a thing, his world view was basically that people don't think at all. They are hypnotized by language. They think in words, and those words can be used to completely hijack their consciousness, hypnotizing them. In his world view, people were only barely capable of a defense against this at best. And even at people's best, because our entire world model is often built on language, it ends up with all sorts of terrible pathways being laid down that are horribly wrong because of words and how lossy an abstraction they can be. Choose the right name for something, and even with firsthand experience telling them otherwise, people will walk away believing the opposite of reality.
All the shortcomings of human cognition that Scott Adams pioneered broad public awareness of pre-LLMs sound a whole awful lot like all the ways LLMs are shit these days. I never really followed up much with Scott Adams the last few years of his life. I don't know if he ever chased down this avenue too, but I hope he did.
I'll be deeply curious if LLMs can be trained to be better next token predictors than the humans that deny they are in the first place.
Well I don't think I have too much to say in response, but if you want a more in-depth exploration of the ideas you're talking about I'd recommend the anime film Genocidal Organ (or the novel it's based on, though I've only seen the film). It's all about the idea that language can be used and manipulated to control people in just about every single way. I think I mostly disagree with the arguments made in the film, but it presented some interesting ideas to chew on. It also has some good action scenes, including an orbital drop assault (probably the best part of the film).
Also Hideo Kojima was good friends with the author, and you can definitely tell that the vocal chord parasites in MGS5 were inspired by Genocidal Organ.
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