Week of 2023-04-03
Where I learn about sailors and pirates, and the nightmares that drive them. Also, a riff on LLMs and how we engage with them. Because everyone has to have a think piece on LLMs, right?
Sailors and Pirates
Here’s a fun metaphor for you. I’ve been chatting with colleagues about the behavior patterns and habits of leaders that I’ve been observing, and we recognized that there are two loose groups that we can see: sailors and pirates.
The sailors are part of the crew. They are following orders and making things that have been deemed important happen. Ordinary sailors have little agency: they are part of the larger machine that is intent on moving in a certain direction. Sailors higher in the power structure (and there is usually a power structure when sailors get together) have more agency. They have more freedom in how the things happen, but they are still held responsible for whether they happen or not.
Organization leaders who are sailors are subject to the primary anxiety of things being out of control. Their catastrophic scenario is that all this wonderful energy that they have in the people they lead is not applied effectively to the problem at hand. They wake up in cold sweat after dreaming of being lost or late, of being disoriented and bewildered in some chaotic mess.
This makes them fairly easy to spot. Listen to how they talk. They will nearly always speak of the need to align, to make better decisions, to be more efficient and better coordinated. Sailor leaders love organizing things. For a sailor leader, neat is good.
Every organization needs sailors. Particularly in scenarios where we know where we are going, sailors are who will get you there. They are the reliable folks who feel pride and honor to drive their particular ship (or part of the ship, no matter how small) toward the destination. Sailor leaders don’t have to be boring, but they prefer it that way. Excitement is best confined to the box where it doesn’t disrupt the forward movement.
Pirates are different. The word “pirate” conjures all kinds of imagery, some vividly negative. For our purposes, let’s take Jack Sparrow as the kind of pirate we’re talking about here.
As I mentioned, pirates are different. They loathe the orderly environment that the sailors thrive in. They yearn for a small ship that can move fast and make unexpected lateral moves.
Pirate’s driving anxiety is that of confinement. Whether consciously or not, their catastrophizing always involves being stuck. Their nightmares are filled with visions of being trapped or restrained, with no possibility of escape, of being pressed down by immovable weight.
Pirates seek options and choose to play in environments where the options are many. This is why we often find them in chaotic environments, though chaos is not something they may seek directly. It’s just that when there’s chaos, many of the variables that were previously thought to be constant become changeable. It’s that space that is opened up by the chaos-induced shifts that the pirates thrive in. And sometimes, often unwittingly, they will keep causing a little chaos – or a lot of it – to create that option space.
Pirate leaders are also not difficult to detect. They are usually the weird ones. They keep resisting the organization’s desire to be organized. They usually shun positions of power and upward movement in the hierarchies. For the saddest pirate is the one who climbed through the ranks to arrive at a highly prestigious, yet extremely sailor position.
Pirate leaders are known to inject chaos. If you’ve ever been to a meticulously planned and organized meeting, where its key participant throws the script away right at the beginning and takes it in a completely different direction – you’ve met a pirate leader.
It’s easy to see how sailors and pirates are oil and water. Sailors despise the pirate’s incessant bucking of the system. Pirates hate the rigid order of the sailors and their desire to reduce the available options.
Then, why are pirates even found in organizations? Aren’t they better off in their Flying Dutchman somewhere, doing their pirate things?
The thing is, pirates need sailors. A shipful of pirates is not really a ship. With everyone seeking options, the thing ain’t going anywhere. Pirates need sailors who are happy to organize the boring details of the pirate adventure. And the more ambitious the adventure, the more sailors are needed.
Conversely, sailors need pirates. A ship that doesn’t have a single pirate isn’t a ship either – it’s an island. The most organized and neat state of a ship is static equilibrium. When a pirate captain leaves a ship, and no pirate steps up, the ship may look functional for a while, and even look nicer, all of the cannons shining of bright polish and sails finally washed and repaired.
But over time, it will become apparent that the reason for all these excellent looks is the lack of actual action. The safest, neatest course of action is to stay in place and preserve the glorious legends of the past.
The mutual disdain, combined with the mutual need creates a powerful tension. Every team and organization has it. The tension can only be resolved dynamically – what could have been the right proportion of pirates and sailors yesterday might not be the same today. Sometimes we could use fewer pirates, and other times, we need more of them.
To resolve this tension well, organizations need this interesting flexibility, where pirates and sailors aren’t identities, but roles. Especially in leadership, the ability to play both roles well is a valuable skill. Being able to assume the role flexibly depending on the situation gives us the capacity to be both pirates and sailors – and gives the organization a much higher chance of acting in accordance with its intentions.
The most effective pirate is a meta-pirate: someone who can be both a pirate and a sailor in the moment as a way to keep the opportunity space maximally open.
We all have this capacity. The reason I described the nightmare plots for the sailor and the pirate is to help you recognize them in your own dreams. Experienced both kinds? You are likely both a little bit of a pirate and a sailor at heart. If one is more common than the other, that’s probably the indicator of where you are leaning currently. So, if you’re looking to become a meta-pirate, that’s an indicator of where to focus the work of detaching the role from your identity.
🔗https://glazkov.com/2023/04/02/sailors-and-pirates/
How we engage with LLMs
It seems popular to write about generative AI and large language models (aka LLMs) these days. There are a variety of ways in which people make sense out of this space and the whole phenomenon of “artificial intelligence” – I use double-quotes here, because the term has gotten quite blurry semantically.
I’ve been looking for a way to make sense of all of these bubbling insights, and here’s a sketch of a framework that is based on the Adult Development Theory (ADT). The framework presumes that we engage with LLMs from different parts of our whole Selves, with some parts being at earlier stages of development and some parts at the later. I call these parts “Minds”, since to us, they feel like our own minds, each with its own level of complexity and attributes. They change rapidly within us, often without us noticing.
These minds are loosely based on the ADT stages: the earliest and least complex Opportunist Mind, the glue-of-society Socialized Mind, the make-things-work Expert Mind, and the introspective Achiever Mind.
🥇The Opportunist Mind
When we engage with an LLM with an Opportunist Mind, we are mostly interested in poking at it and figuring out where its weaknesses and strengths lie. We are trying to trick it, to reveal its secrets, be that initial prompts or biases. From this stance, we just want to figure out what it’s made of and how we could potentially exploit it. Twitter is abuzz with individuals making LLMs act in ways that are beneficial to illustrating their arguments. All of those are symptoms of the Opportunist Mind approach to this particular technology.
There’s nothing wrong with engaging an LLM in this way. After all, vigorous product testing makes for a better product. Just beware that an Opportunist Mind perch has a very limited view, and the quality of insights gained from it is generally low. I typically steer clear from expert analyses engaging with LLMs from this mind. Those might as well be generated by LLMs themselves.
👥The Socialized Mind
When the LLM becomes our DM buddy or a game playing partner, we are engaging with an LLM with a Socialized Mind. When I do that, there’s often a threshold moment when I start seeing an LLM as another human being, with thoughts and wishes. I find myself falling into habits of human relationship-building, with all of the rules and ceremonies of socializing. If you ever find yourself trying to “be nice” to an LLM chat bot, it’s probably your Socialized Mind talking.
At the core of this stance is — consciously or subconsciously — constructing a mental model of an LLM as that of a person. This kind of mental model is not unique to the Socialized Mind, but when engaging with this mind, we want to relate to this perception of a human, to build a connection with it.
This can be wonderful when held lightly. Pouring our hearts to a good listener convincingly played by an LLM can be rather satisfying. However, if we forget that our mental model is an illusion, we get into all sorts of trouble. Nowadays, LLMs are pretty good at pretending to be human, and the illusion of a human-like individual behind the words can be hard to shake off. And so we become vulnerable to the traps of “is it conscious/alive or not?” conversations. Any press publication or expert analysis in this vein is only mildly interesting to me, since the perch of the Socialized Mind is not much higher than that of the Opportunist Mind, and precludes seeing the larger picture.
🧰The Expert Mind
Our Expert Mind engages with an LLM at a utilitarian level. What can I get out of this thing? Can I figure out how the gears click on the inside — and then make it do my bidding? A very common signal of us engaging LLMs with our Expert Mind is asking for JSON output. When that’s the case, it is very likely we see the LLM as a cog in some larger machine of making. We spend a lot of time making the cog behave just right – and are upset when it doesn’t. A delightful example that I recently stumbled into is the AI Functions: a way to make an LLM pretend to execute a pretend function (specified only as input/output and a rough description of what it should do) and return its result.
Expert Minds are tinkerers – they produce actual prototypes of things other people can try and get inspired to do more tinkering. For this reason, I see Expert Mind engagements as the fertile ground for dandelion-like exploration of new idea spaces. Because they produce artifacts, I am very interested in observing Expert Mind engagements. These usually come as links to tiny Github repos and tweets of screen captures. They are the probes that map out the yet-unseen and shifting landscape, serving as data for broader insights.
📝The Achiever Mind
I wanted to finish my little story here, but there’s something very interesting in what looks like a potential Achiever Mind engagement. This kind of engagement includes the tinkering spirit of the Expert Mind and enriches it with the mental modeling of the Socialized Mind, transcending both into something more.
When we approach LLMs with the Achiever Mind, we recognize that the nature of this weird epistemological tangle created by an LLM creates opportunities that we can’t even properly frame yet. We can get even more interesting outcomes than the direct instruction-to-JSON approach of our Expert Mind engagement by considering this tangle and poking at it.
The ReAct paper shone the light at this kind of engagement for me. It revealed that, in addition to direct “do this, do that” requests, LLMs are capable of something that looks like metacognition: the ability to analyze the request and come up with a list of steps to satisfy the request. This discovery took someone looking at the same thing that everyone was looking at, and then carefully reframing what they are seeing into something entirely different.
Reframing is Achiever Mind’s superpower, and it comes in handy in wild new spaces like LLM applications. Metaphorically, if Expert Mind engagements explore the room in the house, Achiever Mind engagements find and unlock doors to new rooms. The unlocking of the room done by ReAct paper allowed a whole bunch of useful artifacts, from LangChain to Fixie to ChatGPT plugins to emerge.
This story feels a bit incomplete, but has been useful for me to write down. I needed a way to clarify why I intuitively gravitate toward some bits of insight in the wild more than others. This framework helped me see that. I hope it does the same for you.