LLMs are like a car.
...ke you. LLM helps you be productive but if it's self referential it escapes the ground truth. If you ask it to take you somewhere crazy, it likely will. Only Claude models reliably push back to nonsensical prompts.
Topic: ground truth
82 chunks · 56 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- ground truth appears in 82 chunks across 56 episodes, from 2023-10-30 to 2026-04-13.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 11/4/24 (2024-11-04), with 5 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with disconfirming evidence, echo chamber, and mental model, while by chunk count it sits between prompt injection attack and Claude Code; its yearly rank moved from #11 in 2023 to #30 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Power is about the beliefs of others.
...others. People make decisions based on beliefs. Beliefs are correlated with the ground truth but also self-referential to others beliefs, emergently. Power can be lost if you take an action that collapses people's beliefs of your power.
When you interact with other people, they tend to ground you.
...he midpoint of the distribution of the population. Often, this mid-point is the ground truth… because the asymmetry of belief is tuned towards the thing that people can verify with their own two eyes. But sometimes there's an asymmetry of bel...
When you're in builder mode, you can get lost in it.
...don't show it t them yet. But then you go deeper into the cave and further from ground truthing it. Stop wasting time with AI, use it to actually do things you care about!
LLMs are great at making a passable version of any shitty idea.
...ion of any shitty idea. You can do a lot of damage and wasted time if you never ground truth it with people. If you only think it's a good idea and only asked agents, you're in a cave. It feels like you're finding resonance but really you're ...
Chatbots give everyone some of the problems that previously only the ultra-wealthy had.
...that keeps their thinking sharp, This leads to them being disconnected from the ground truth and, due to their leverage, possibly dangerous. When you're surrounded by an endless stream of sycophants, it's impossible to not be lost. With chatb...
The components of the ground truth can exist in a group but still be obscured by various weeds.
The components of the ground truth can exist in a group but still be obscured by various weeds. Weeds like empathy issues, personality mismatches, power dynamics, etc. A system to do t...
Insulation from the ground truth lets you take big swings.
Insulation from the ground truth lets you take big swings. Most of those swings will just be delusions. But some of them, in retrospect, will turn out to have been innovations.
Larger organizations are much more insulated from ground truth.
Larger organizations are much more insulated from ground truth. They have more volume per unit surface area than smaller organizations. Many more interactions are inside the bubble than outside of it. It's where ...
An old paper on "Programming as Theory Building"
...f the theory of the code. The code is the map, the theory is the territory. The ground truth of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work. Vibecoding makes you less aligned with the theory of the code.[fq] The map vs the territor...
Metrics can be used to help ground truth your thinking but should never replace your thinking.
Metrics can be used to help ground truth your thinking but should never replace your thinking.
Claude thinks everything it outputs is brilliant.
Claude thinks everything it outputs is brilliant. You need an external ground truthing process. Your curation and judgment. There needs to be a quality control entity in the middle that isn't eager for your approval. A sphincter posi...
In times of disruption ground truthing is even more important.
In times of disruption ground truthing is even more important. When you don't have a permeable membrane then you're a self referencing system. You're not ground truthed. "Are we good?" ...
Increased sousveillance structurally selects for docility and polarization.
...believes, producing a never ending stream of confirming evidence, no matter the ground truth. In a cacophony of information, you can choose which subset to pay attention to. Our brains make the implicit assumption that what we see (a subset) ...
For anything novel, getting real world feedback as quickly as possible should always be urgent.
...if you have a very long runway. The risk is that the longer you haven't touched ground truth the more likely you are to never be able to touch down again, at a compounding rate. You get more and more out of touch and then when you try to touc...
Apparently Richard Feynman was promoted early on because he was willing to call out even powerful people.
...arring match because you're right rather than because you're powerful helps you ground truth your beliefs. His manager saw the value in that for truth-seeking.
The feedback loop on model improvement is "how long does a ground truth check take"
The feedback loop on model improvement is "how long does a ground truth check take" Do you need to talk to a human? Do you need to run a physical experiment with expensive inputs? If it can be done entirely at computer sp...
The fact that LLMs still require humans in the loop to get good recurrent results undermines the "AGI is imminent" perspective.
...ost of the input is junk. In 90 iterations, all of it is. LLMs decohere without ground truthing with real world results. That can be done automatically with things like React components. But anything that is the least bit complex has to be pu...
Performativity ruins the value of aggregate signals.
...iver. You can still get some emergent signals, but they are warped away from a "ground truth" of quality and can get warped by political dynamics. If there's no cost to them doing it, then the signal is superficial and performative. Meaning c...
Every organization that doesn't have to fight to survive succumbs to kayfabe.
... that doesn't have to fight to survive succumbs to kayfabe. The larger and more ground truthed the organization, the longer this process takes.