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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   30887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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There is an IKEA effect when it comes to LLMs, where people find the text that they prompted to be fascinating, and the text that others prompted to be boring.

I do think it's interesting. But ultimately this... now removed conversation was only the "bouncing ideas off of a rubber duck" phase of making a well directed point or refining an insight.

I think that part of what makes the LLMs so attractive is their ability and infinite willingness to listen to and expand one's own thoughts. It feels good because the ideas flow more smoothly. You have a social interface to lean them on and reify/refine them with, and of course, these models are usually intoxicatingly positive too.

When you write something for an audience, you have to be attentive to how you are directing the audience's attention, who the audience is. What concepts they are aware of, and how to move their attention cleanly from idea to idea with minimal friction. In the case of this post, even just a preface introducing the context of the chat to us would have been a nice improvement (though I still think any full convos should be linked and then discussed rather than hard posted in a top comment). LLMs talking just to you can be writing for an audience of just you, referencing priors and ideas that the LLM inferred would click with you. And using interaction modes that you told them to use to optimally interface with you.

Why is that called an IKEA effect?

I think there's more to it than the IKEA effect. But, the IKEA effect is a cognitive bias or quirk where people value things they assembled themselves more than things built by someone else. It is named after the store IKEA which sells furniture that you must self-assemble.

From wikipedia

A 2011 study found that subjects were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for equivalent pre-assembled items.

I'm not sure this is really a bias in all cases. Having built something develops virtue and having that memory triggered when you see the object cements that virtue. But when the IKEA effect shows up in the context of assessing whether something is a good deal based on its actual cost of production- or estimating something's value to others- it can definitely be a bias in that context and lead to overestimating things you made.

I'd call it the vacation picture effect!

I like that!

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