If you're interested in mathematical bounds in AI systems and you haven't seen it already check out https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043 Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation by Seth Loyd and related works. Online I've been jokingly saying "Intelligence has a speed of light." Well, we know intelligence involves computation so there has to be some upper bound at some point. But until we define some notion of Atomic Standard Reasoning Unit of Inferential Distance, we don't have a good way of talking about how much more efficient a computer like you and me are compared to Claude at natural language generation, for example.
If I read this and understood it 1 year ago, it would have saved me the painful process of discovering these patterns myself. This was a gaping hole in my world model. Something about being a student of history gave me a false sense of distance from these patterns. I thought I was living in a world where machiavellian environments would not be something I had to think about at all. Slowly, cracks formed and then all at once, that worldview shattered.
So, what do we do about this? It seems intuitively important to at least develop the ability to identify what kind of environment, political or driven by measurable impact, you're looking at. This is especially difficult when that environment is systematically lying to you (in job postings, for example). And besides that, the same thing would be valuable to learn about all the people in your management chain at a corporation.
This is very validating and it gives me more thinking to do. Thank you for sharing this.
I think this discussion about advice is very fruitful. I think the existing comments do a great job of characterizing why someone might reasonably be offended. So if we take that as the given situation: you want to help people, project respect, but don't want it to come off the wrong way, what could you do?
My partial answer to this, is merely sharing your own authentic experience of why you are personally persuaded by the content of the advice, and allowing them to internalize that evidence and derive inferences for themselves. At social gatherings, the people in my life do this- just sharing stories, sometimes horror stories where the point is so obvious that it doesn't need explicit statement. And it feels like a genuine form of social currency to faithfully report on your experiences. This reminds me of "Replace the Symbol with the Substance" [1] where the advice is the symbol and the experience is the substance.
So I wonder if that's part of it - creating the same change in the person anyway a the while mitigating the risk of condescension. The dynamics of the relationship also complicate analyzing the situation. And in what type of social setting the advice is delivered. And probably a bunch more factors I haven't thought of yet.
[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GKfPL6LQFgB49FEnv/replace-the-symbol-with-the-substance