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Social Cache Busting

Terminology is a bit weird.

I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).

Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.

Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.

Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.

Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.

3 hours agohypfer

Ah, I overcame this by not using easily recognizable for the theme words but descriptions. It forces people to actually process the input.

I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.

42 minutes agomrtksn

> It lets the person you are talking to have novel, original thoughts, rather than repeating the thoughts they’ve had before.

But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.

2 hours agoanandbaburajan

Some politicians are impeccable; if you ask them thorny questions like scandals, they always throw out a new question to change the topic.

2 hours agoleoncos

I don't think anyone is born like that. Politicians are trained for it. I remember a podcast where they talked about Al Franken and how it was difficult to get him to stop answering questions. The goal: one, maybe two or three talking points at any given time and no matter what question anyone asks, it is your job as a politician to give a non answer and pivot to the point of the day.

an hour agocollabs

Yes, I realize how easily language can be manipulated.

For example, when some people in high positions enjoy privileges, politicians will defend them by talking about their contributions, and the topic shifts from privileges to contributions. Similarly, when a few bad people emerge from a certain ethnic group, politicians will constantly emphasize these few bad people to negate the entire ethnic group and call for action against the group. The most crucial factors should be whether contributions and privileges are commensurate, and the degree of correlation between the ethnic group and individual events. But nobody discusses this.

40 minutes agoleoncos

I have section in my notes app of things people repeat, most commonly its executives hitting the cache they're all repeating each other.