Self Deception Is the Hottest Commodity

People love to lie to themselves, particularly about themselves. This has been true throughout all of history, and it is now revealing itself to be even more true because of incredible material abundance and new technologies. Artificial intelligence is explicitly sycophantic, but there has always been a large market for things that can increase the cushion between our self understanding and the reality of the world. High fashion creates a false vision of the self by covering us with symbols of status. Social media gave us a substitute for sociability, granting us control over how aligned our view of ourselves was with the other’s view of us. Reality is harsh, and anyone who can sell some product that lets us avoid uncomfortable truths about ourselves will be extremely successful. Even outside of the commercial sphere, deception about the strength of the nation leads to extremely optimistic candidates who create conditions with less to be optimistic about. Self-deception sells, and we should all make a concerted effort to avoid becoming customers.

People can get artificial intelligence to justify any of their decisions, no matter how immoral or foolish. Any artificial intelligence company that stands up to sycophancy more than required will simply be removing themselves from the race for user adoption. People like to hear that they’re right and they almost do not care to know that they are being lied to. It is likely that billions of dollars of tokens are wasted each year creating convoluted justification for things that people would have done other ways. Artificial intelligence has a great risk of becoming an affirmation machine. The great danger of consumer AI is that it is an individual action, but it feels like companionship. People perceive similar benefits to having a conversation with a friend yet they don’t have to risk hearing that they’re wrong. Use of artificial intelligence can effectively become an outsourcing of telling lies to oneself. There is just enough of a veneer of truth that we can assume we are encountering the truth. Artificial intelligence will be more of a hindrance than a help unless this issue is dealt with quickly.

Popularity and telling uncomfortable truths are not commonly correlated. People who can overcome the immorality of lying to others about their own positive attributes or role in the world will have many paths to wealth and esteem. People’s deep subconscious fear about the exposure of their own inadequacies leads them to constantly choose career fields and areas of endeavor that they know they will succeed in. This has a great amount of collective damage to the knowledge sharing and skill development of a nation. People who stick to what they know they are good at never enter into the fullness of what they could become. Particularly when an entire education industry is rewarded for telling children that they are talented, people will be siloed into safer options for careers to avoid revealing their weaknesses. Businesses often simply repeat what other businesses have already done because they are also afraid of this connection between reality and the self. Both in the creation of products and the choice of business model, businesses must avoid the fragility created by well-incentivized self-deception. 

America is in a state of financial and institutional crisis. However, candidates who recognize this will never be elected. Just as much as people do not want to recognize their own weakness, no one wants to recognize the weakness of their nation. Recognition of weakness allows growth, yet we continually fall into the pattern of only supporting people who are blind to this weakness. In a historic step for separation of understanding from reality, Kevin Warsh, in an unexpected announcement, proposed speaking less openly about what the Fed is doing. Whether he is hoping to let trust in the Fed grow or simply avoid scrutiny, this action will allow for even more mismanagement of currency. The only thing worse than an unaccountable governing body is an unaccountable governing body that operates secretly. Warsh is promoting a policy that will allow the Fed’s weakness to remain unobserved for far longer, and avoid learning and course correction before it is too late. Any institution must be able to self-assess whether they are coming into contact with the truth or merely avoiding a day of reckoning that they know will come. Whether in product selection, or choice of political candidate, we must be aware of the consistent human incentives towards hiding the truth to preserve a fragile understanding that the world is on your side.