There's this idea in the zeitgeist right now that the "negative take" is the "realistic take" - there's some pop science that confirms the pessimists' confirmation bias too.

The reality is that while things often balance on a knife's edge precipice of chaos and calamity, things are WAY better than how they used to be by many many metrics, but humans are primed to be negative. You actively have to specifically choose to not be a debbie downer. You're wired to be bummed out. We all are, and this sort of "negative framing of things" and aggressive "yes but" seems really smart to a lot of people.

I used to see this same shit all the time in meetings.

"We are here to discuss problem X!" "Yeah, but have you considered other problems A-W?" "Those are valid concerns, but we are hear to solve X." <grumpy face> "Well, we cannot solve X until we solve A-W" <nothing gets done>

Almost a year ago now, I realized what it was. In large institutions, people get to look smart when they poke holes in things, and that wins them social cachet. In a bigger org, you're not actually rewarded for getting much done. You're rewarded for making your chain of command look better. Sometimes that involves "getting stuff done" but it can also look like being the person who says, "oh that won't work" or "have we considered Z?" over Zoom. Unfortunately though, building things never is actually something where you get everything right the first time. So the meetings to plan the future meetings build out into a miasma of nothing and when you let perfect be the enemy of good, you'll never accomplish anything. You'll look insanely busy because you'll be constantly be arguing with a group of box-tickers and concern trolls about increasingly calamitous hypotheticals, but you'll accomplish nothing.

David Graeber was right about this. Since Claude has been trained on internal slack channels and this behavior on the web, I'm sure this is why this sort of behavior exists. Because I bet that there's tons of meetings at Anthropic about "well, have you thought about <insert irrelevant issue>" or "we should reframe this take" or whatever.

It's kind of funny actually.