welcome to the 2nd part of the skill issues series. previously i talked about how i feel majority of the people around are just paranoid by the notion of success. in this particular piece of writing i'll be going over another catalyst of this paranoia – the NPC behaviour – the fundamental failure to think.
the NPC crisis
for the laymen, NPCs are video game characters, it is an Internet meme that represents people deemed to not think for themselves. but on a very low level, is it just a meme and limited to video games or it leads to something deeper? something that affects the way we interact with our life.
lets start with a simple question: what is it that you truly enjoy doing in your life? doesn't have to be anything sexy like hitting the gym, could be as boring as writing code or as nonsense as just wasting time with a circle of "friends". now the tedious part, analyze what is is that makes you want to enjoy it. is it the dopamine hit of flexing your muscles, the tempting headlines of huge salaries in news or the escape from your insecurities of social validation.
sometimes we just blindly follow beliefs, without even questioning their rationality or putting our opinion first. we've all been in that position and what we fail to realise is that we slowly lose the control of our life – often making our life "less ours" – it is then governed by a superior acting figure and their expectations.
back when schools reopened after the covid pandemic it was weird for me to see everyone having new friends and relationships across different sections. all this time they were connected with each other through instagram, snapchat and stuff. looking at a particular group of students i felt that scoring good marks could help me get noticed by the teachers, but was it worth the chase? definitely not.
i don't know what those particular group of students are upto now, but for me scoring good marks gave no crazy incentive other than helping me get into a good college. i learn a shit ton of things on a regular basis but almost all the learning happens outside of educational institutes.
the llm theory
humans and LLMs learn new things the same way i.e. through observations. we do certain things, evaluate whether it turned out the way we expected and based on the evaluation we alter our thoughts towards that certain thing. i am a firm believer that life can change drastically in no time, things can make a shift overnight and that is due to certain experiences that i might have had previously. but the other day i read that this belief will always keep me under the fear of tomorrow, always thinking that what i have in present with me might not exist tomorrow. making me not want to celebrate those "small wins".
this is similar to bias in a llm, it is caused due to limited training window a.k.a. lack of diverse experiences for humans. i was intrigued by tech quite early off, it started by playing games on my pc then learning how to code, also did video editing, gfx and music prod. in the mid way, failed a lot of times in each of these but unknowingly and involuntarily i was exposed to several experiences that fostered creativity. i don't see a lot of people with a creative mindset around me (especially in my local maxima), people are either too focused on unnecessary details or not focused at all.
i get this particular clip of rick rubin's interview in my feed a lot where he said "what makes it great is the personal" and its true. we all have different backgrounds and experiences, the perspective we hold is what truly makes us unique, its not the partisanship towards a belief. independence of thoughts is free and one of the important factors for self-awareness, it shouldn't be taken for granted.
another similarity between an LLM and a human is the way they both respond. While we now have reasoning models, the core LLM architecture works by searching for information related to the given topic in its training data and generating a response based on patterns rather than true understanding often leading to hallucinations (the act of making up superficial facts that seem true). its more of a prediction rather than thinking. so really the key takeaway here is to think instead of blurting out bullsh*t responses or while taking a stand for someone (or even for yourself).
key takeaways
in society, NPC behaviour isn't just a meme, its a reflection of blind beliefs and failure to think. up next, i'll be talking about Narcissism and insecurities.