The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander)
20 comments
·August 7, 2025CoopaTroopa
AndrewDucker
As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago: "any parable that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also about technology, because it's technology that allows the average person to get that power"
bananaflag
Thanks! Even though I have the whole Squid314 archive, I had forgotten about this follow-up.
Jun8
Compare/contrast the Whispering earring/LLM chat with The Room from Stalker, each one is terrifying in its aspect: One because it eventually coaxes you to become a shallow shell of yourself, the other by plucking an unexpected wish from the deepest part of your psyche. I wonder what the Earring would advise if one were to ask it if one should enter The Room.
tacitusarc
I think this ignores the internal conflict in most people’s psyche. The simplest form of this is long term vs short term thinking, but certainly our desires pull us in competing, sometimes opposite, directions.
Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book?
These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function, they are different utility functions entirely.
Soon after being put on, the whispering earring would go insane.
summa_tech
A distant relative, no doubt, of Stanislaw Lem's "Automatthew's Friend" (1964). A perfectly rational, indestructible, selfless, well-meaning in-ear AI assistant. In the end, out of nothing but the deepest care for its owner's mental state in a hopeless situation, it advocates efficient and quick suicide.
throwanem
He warned himself?
abeppu
I want someone to try building a variant that just gives you timely cues about generally good mental health practices. Suggestions could be contextually based on a local-only app that listens to you and your environment, and delivered to a wireless earbud. When you're in a situation that might cause you stress, it reminds you to take some deep breaths. When you're in a situation where you might be tempted to react with hostility, it suggests that you pause for a few seconds. When you've been sitting in front of your computer too long it suggests that maybe you'd like to go for a short walk.
If the moral of the story is that having access to magically good advice is dangerous because it shifts us to habitual obedience ... can a similar device shift us to mental habits that are actually good for us?
ryandv
The moral of the story is that neocortical facilities (vaguely corresponding to what distinguishes modern humans) depend on free will. If you want to merely enthral yourself to voices of the gods a la Julian Jaynes' bicameral man, you can, but this is a regression to a prior stage of humanity's development - away from egoic, free willed man, and backwards to more of a reactive automaton, merely a servant of (possibly digital) gods.
abeppu
I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step away from being a reactive automaton.
patcon
My sensibility is that agency is about "noticing". The content of information seems perhaps less important than the attention allocation mechanism that brings our attention to something.
If you write all your own words, but without an ability to direct your attention to what needed words conjured around it, did you really do anything important at all? (Yes, that's perhaps controversial :) )
ryandv
Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity.
In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally endogenous psychotechnologies that serve this same purpose, without the need to atrophy your psyche.
AndrewDucker
It's a classic, and the recent rise of AI will hopefully make it a more widely-known one.
tempodox
I would recommend Steely Dan’s “Green Earrings” instead. No whispering required!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wvH1UzhiKk
And the original is fully analog.
JohnKemeny
Scott Alexander Siskind is a hack and HN should stop obsessing over him and the rest of the EA cult.
rwnspace
He has some great essays and research pieces and has fostered a generally nice community of people who grew out of LessWrong. There aren't many places online to talk about those things in a certain way without it devolving rapidly.
dafelst
What is EA in this context?
y-curious
I had to ask AI (ironically), it means Effective Altruism in this context. I'm not really sure what the parent's hate for EA comes from, but I don't hang out in those circles
mock-possum
Guess we’ll have to just take your word for it - I found this one to be a nice little read, reminds me a bit of Borges.
"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself."
https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...