On Fearing the Whispering Earring
I recently stumbled upon a small parable called "Clarity didn’t work, trying mysterianism" written by Scott Alexander. The story is more commonly referred to as "The Whispering Earring" in reference to the magical earring that is described in the story.
It’s a short parable, and I strongly suggest reading it, but the crux of it is there exists an earring that can whisper into the wearer’s ear, and it offers advice to the wearer that is always right. The earring can help the wearer make decisions better than they could ever make on their own. Eventually the earring will ditch spoken word and instead adopt more efficient forms of communication via hisses and clicks that will contract the wearer’s muscles, skipping the middle-man of the wearer’s own brain. As one can imagine, the wearer’s own brain atrophies over time as the earring takes full control. The end result is the wearer lives a life deferring all decisions to the earring and the outcome is the wearer has a perfectly happy & abnormally successful life surrounded by community, family, and friends that love them. You the reader are left to wonder if the wearer really lived a life worth living.
This parable struck a chord with me. It’s quite prophetic. Scott wrote the parable long before the advent of LLM, yet it feels as though Scott is talking about his lived experience in a world saturated with AI.
There’s no question that I’ve been deferring more of my thinking to AI. I could sit down and spend a lot of time on every problem I face; maybe even learn a thing or two. But not all of my problems are for personal growth - sometimes I just need to get shit done. A recent example: I’ve been doing some life-planning around children, jobs, and finances. I had a choice: spin up an empty Google Sheet and start researching & cranking on numbers OR spin up a Claude Code instance and give it the problem I’m trying to solve. I chose the latter and created a plan that appears detailed and well-thought out, but I couldn’t tell you a single formula used. I didn’t learn anything, but I’m confident as hell that I have a legitimate plan.
However, a change is occurring that feels deeply uncomfortable. I’m no longer using AI just to get shit done. I’m beginning to use it to reaffirm my own decisions, and in the process, finding that the AI offers a more appealing alternative. I’m worried that will lead to a self-reinforcing loop where I only make major decisions after conferring with AI. Very quickly I could end up in a strange grey area where I will feel as though I’m in control of major decisions in my life when in reality I’m wearing the whispering earring.
This is happening at a profoundly grand scale. "You should chat that" is becoming a common phrase. We are skipping to the punchline. Where should we eat? Just chat that. Where should we get married? Let’s chat that. When should we have kids? We should chat that. Where should we live? Chat probably knows better than we do. How do I tell her I love her? Chat will say it more eloquently. How do I live my life?
Like many of my ramblings, I don’t have a solution, but I do know that this is something I need to be on the defense with much like I’ve been on the defense with infinite-scrolling social media. I do not want to passively receive opinions from some algorithm on social media, and I do not want to passively walk through life under the direction of some super-intelligent machine. Even if that means I’m living life sub-optimally. That will inevitably mean I will have to research and learn things that I don’t necessarily want to spend the time learning, but I want to own the decision, so I must.
I’ll end on the most interesting tidbit from the parable. The first thing that the earring (the one that is always right) says to its wearer is: "Better for you if you take me off."