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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.

I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:

“Don’t pride yourself on any assets but your own. We could put up with a horse if it bragged of its beauty. But don’t you see that when you boast of having a beautiful horse, you are taking credit for the horse’s traits? What quality belongs to you? The intelligent use of impressions. If you use impressions as nature prescribes, go ahead and indulge your pride, because then you will be celebrating a quality distinctly your own.”

Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)

I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)

I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.

Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.

What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.