We are so hungry for connection that we will find deep meaning in even the lightest customization.
- We are so hungry for connection that we will find deep meaning in even the lightest customization.
- Horoscopes are around for a reason, despite only sorting you into one of 12 buckets.
- But horoscopes get even more compelling with even a little bit of savvy customization.
- When someone reflects back to you something that you hadn't told them but feels right, you feel seen.
- It is a warm, intoxicating feeling.
- Like someone is peering inside your soul.
- People who are savvy at pulling on the threads of faint priors can seem to do magic.
- When reading tea leaves or palms, the craft is about seeing the person and making educated guesses.
- If you take notes, your guesses can get better and better over time.
- Both intra-person, by seeing how disparate bits of information collapse the wave function orders of magnitude better than single bits would.
- Or across people, by seeing patterns across people in this region.
- Apparently palm readers will often sell their notes to the person who buys their practice, allowing the next palm reader to also have preternaturally good insight.[b]
- I'm also reminded of the old article in Wired about a company in Cyprus that provides catphishing as a service.
- Its contractors, over time, concoct a deep and meaningful relationship with a mark by developing a coherent and meaningful persona.
- The thing that was shocking is not that it happens (I guess modern society has numbed me) but rather how it works.
- I would have presumed that each mark would have one, two, maybe three people who "play" the character over time or over shifts.
- But actually, each character was played by a random contractor, one every message or so.
- The contractor would get the casefile and the most recent message, and have a minute or two to send a new message, update the casefile if necessary… and likely never return.
- A given contractor had tiny micro-slice of interaction, but when strung together, the illusion of a real, coherent person was unmistakable.
- Like a grotesque secret version of exquisite corpse.
- This was all before LLMs became big… I shudder to think what's happening now.