In reply to Venkatesh Rao's Blyg — Venkatesh Rao
People hating my use of AI, especially when it succeeds, is an extension of the hatred of mediocrity. It’s literally me bolting the statistical average of humanity to my head. With gigawatts of electricity pumped through, applied with relentless patience.
Loved this image of AI usage. Not sure where I stand on mediocrity. To the extent it is anti-special-person, I guess I'm on board. It's democratizing, although not usually presented in those terms. But I've always had an attraction to genius, despite very much not being one. Geniuses are be definition special people, gifted with more than ordinary capabilities. Venkat is obviously a kind of genius despite his protestations of mediocrity, no normal person could produce that much high-quality writing (with or without AI enhancement).
Another genius of my acquaintance, David Chapman, has written on this. One of the lessons of his flavor of Vajrayana Buddhism is that nobody is special, but nobody is ordinary either (see specialness). These are both evasions or false self-stories (my terms, not his); the resolution of these two false stories is nobility, which in Venkat's terms might mean putting your mediocre abilities to work for the benefit of all beings.
This is why mediocrity and muddling through seems so subversive. It’s a legitimate and effective middle way.
The first is a distrust of established expertise. The technologist knows he is smart—and in terms of raw intelligence, he is in fact often smarter than any random small-mountain subject expert he might encounter. But intelligence is only one of the two altars worshiped in Silicon Valley. The other is action. The founders of the Valley invariably think of themselves as men of action: they code, they build, disrupt, they invent, they conquer. This is a culture where insight, intelligence, and knowledge are treasured—but treasured as tools of action, not goods in and of themselves.
The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite The Scholars Stage ↗
Muddling through, people have no issues with in my experience. Once you explain it properly people realize it’s just the ancestor of agile iteration and a better formulation of it. Mediocrity though… that’s a genuine profanity for most people.
Championing mediocrity has gotten me the most complaints, protests, and attempts to bargain of any topic I’ve written on. Including being slightly evil, slightly monstrous, and sociopathic. People will entertain being slightly evil or slightly monstrous before they’ll entertain the idea of being even slightly mediocre.
They often like to point at some of my own exceptional outcomes, like viral hit blog posts, to argue that I’m being hypocritical and I can’t really mean it. Then I point out that exceptional outcomes don’t correlate to “excellent” efforts in any sense. I wrote The Gervais Principle carelessly while drinking vodka. It’s certainly not the most careful and polished piece of writing I’ve done. It’s strictly mediocre. What’s exceptional is zeitgeist fit, which is not an attribute of effort. It’s not quite “luck” but it’s not excellence either.
People hating my use of AI, especially when it succeeds, is an extension of the hatred of mediocrity. It’s literally me bolting the statistical average of humanity to my head. With gigawatts of electricity pumped through, applied with relentless patience. Even when AI solves Nobel-grade problems it does so by putting more energy into mediocrity, not being excellent. And if you can impedance match AI enough to use it well, it’s proof of mediocrity that many people don’t want to provide. In that sense, AI is the opposite of Thor's hammer or King Arthur’s sword. Everyone except those special people can wield it 🤣.
Struggling to use AI is not necessarily proof of special person genius, but at least it’s not proof of mediocrity.
But mediocrity, the more clearly you explain it, the more people hate it. The “special person” fantasy mindset is very deeply ingrained, especially in the West. If you point them to research like David Chambliss’ Mundanity of Excellence paper, they grudgingly accept the empirical data, but retreat to a less falsifiable spiritual notion of excellence.
In India, I think what was drilled into me growing up was not “you’re special and destined for greatness once Gandalf chooses you” but “if you don’t work hard to score some exceptional opportunities like getting into a good college, you’re going to have a miserable life.”
In a way, the latter is a “strange rules” mindset. Nobody really thinks the brutal test-prep/selection culture is rational, a true test of abilities, fair, or even “meritocratic” (whatever the hell that means). It’s just an arbitrary game you have to play well enough to come out mostly on top. If you get too hung up on what it all means, you’re screwed. Play the game, get your ticket, get out. Even if you come out impressively on top, like being in the top 100 of the IIT entrance exams, it means nothing. Later life outcomes have a messy correlation. What works is playing those games at “good enough” level and not getting your identity attached to them.
This is one reason why first-generation Asian immigrants, despite being half of Silicon Valley at this point, and being a good chunk of both entrepreneurs and senior execs, never manage to inhabit the charismatic special person narratives convincingly. Great Founder theory is for native Westerners. Even second-generation types struggle. Jensen Huang, who moved to the US at 9, comes closest to an Asian managing to play the role of “special person” well.