Having a diverse set of people who ground you is super important.
... time with LLMs than people, you could decohere from society and truth, with no ground truthing of "no, I don't think that makes sense…"
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.
Orgs that fire people more easily will tend towards order more than truth.
...ative even stronger. The only way to counteract this is to have the org have to ground truth constantly. An org that is so successful that they can operate poorly for years without dying but that fires people easily will have the worst of bot...
Self perception and self-deception are easy to confuse.
... motivated views of the same scenario, which makes it easier to triangulate the ground truth.. Perhaps Granola style transcripts could help ground truth? But only if everyone's actions didn't change given they were being recorded. Do we try t...
Some people like learning so much they'll do it for its own sake.
...ledge for what you need. Too much fidelity, not enough doing. The doing is what ground truths and helps figure out where your mental model is incorrect. It's the same asymptotic curve of perfection that is a bad idea in building products. Ove...
Having a single unbiased LLM is an impossibility.
... unintentionally). Who should be the singular arbiters of the infinite, perfect ground truth? There is no answer. "Balancing" can itself also be bias. A point someone made this week: "If one candidate's policy was to encourage infants to eat ...
Goodhart's law is what leads to business models being misaligned with consumers in the limit.
...limit. Companies are a swarm of employees making interdependent decisions whose ground truth is the business model. Ultimately the ground truth about what a company cares about is the business model. Everything else is just platitudes.
In a post truth world ground truth doesn't matter in any given interaction.
In a post truth world ground truth doesn't matter in any given interaction. But of course the ground truth never goes away; it will matter at some point. The first person who points ou...
Corporate politics expand to take all available space over time.
...olitical players. The only thing that contains the expansion of politics is the ground truthed success of the company in the wild. Imagine if you had a swarm of LLM-backed agents in a company. They could conceivably absorb infinite energy, al...
LLMs will get good at everything that can be quickly ground truthed by computers.
LLMs will get good at everything that can be quickly ground truthed by computers. But that doesn't mean they'll do a good job at things that can't. Most meaningful things to humans can't be ground truthed entirely i...
Chaos tends to multiply.
...order propagates? You need a percolating sort; a thing that uses some energy to ground truth and rank so the good things naturally survive to the end.
In adaptive systems, the system, in its swarming and jostling, is constantly trying lots of little variations from the baseline.
...evaporates. But every so often one that is better is found; it has a consistent ground truthed bias that makes it stand strong amidst the noise. This is conserved, naturally. The thing that tried it keeps trying it while it works. Other entit...
Knowledge grows from cycles of conjecture and criticism.
... hypothesis. Then expose that hypothesis to disconfirming evidence, for example ground truthing it. Guess and check. The disconfirming evidence gives you the information necessary to update your hypothesis to make it more accurate. If you don...
User feedback should be used as disconfirming evidence.
User feedback should be used as disconfirming evidence. It helps test and ground truth your hypothesis. it doesn't tell you what to think. You have to have your own hypothesis. What your early adopters (or users via UXR) ask you to do i...
A pre-coherence startup can't have any kayfabe.
...herence startup can't have any kayfabe. It needs to be aggressively, constantly ground truthed in order to survive. It's only post coherence organizations that can (temporarily) survive kayfabe.
A cynical, unproductive form of insatiable social vortex is kayfabe.
...ive form of insatiable social vortex is kayfabe. Kayfabe is separation from the ground truth and leaning into the emergent but incorrect social reality within the organization. The social process is emergent and kayfabe, lofted above the grou...
Reflecting a bit on the game theory of discipline in ships in the days before radio.
...scipline ("tight ship") because they are a pocket of society kept away from the ground truth of the rest of society for extended periods of time. If the captain allows a little slip in the rules you could have a compounding situation get out ...
A parable about the fundamental, inescapable horror of internal politics in large organizations.
...g multiplies together. That means that up multiple ply it could be off from the ground truth by many orders of magnitude. The organization exists to achieve a real outcome in the world, which requires it to understand the ground truth to effe...
Alpha-zero showed how much learning could happen if you had a rigorous ground truth system.
Alpha-zero showed how much learning could happen if you had a rigorous ground truth system[adm]. Games like Go have rigid, clear rules about what moves are legal and what constitutes a win. The ground truth can be applied without a h...
Some AI video output is mind-bendingly bizarre.
...s primary and the world model is secondary. AI video models also have much less ground truth experience in the real world than humans do. Watching when the model makes a weird interpretation that goes against your expectation gives that same ...
True competition keeps us strong.
...ng. But Potemkin villages of competition are just performative. The illusion of ground truthing. Expensive but empty.