LLMs have introduced me to things like photodiodes and specific economists I would likely not have found on my own

I do however wonder about specific research priority/project from labs' solving their own problems leaking into my chats. I noticed one month that Claude really started harping on about "legibility" and suggesting Seeing Like A State to me, and saw it like any other interesting suggestion/insight.

Now I see a lot of people mentioning "legibility" and think that was just some weird attractor state or useful vocabulary term for being an LLM (that literally can't see certain things or be observed easily!). It's a weird feeling, because nobody tried to trick me and in fact it objectively helped me to acquire useful information. I just have to wonder if other people are having the same conversation and there's really nothing special about it - maybe Anthropic just really liked that book right around when they were doing a lot of RL

Not only that, was the intent just to give Claude the vocabulary to be an LLM in a company that wants it to be legible, and apply that book to managing it, and we're either intentionally or unintentionally memetically downstream of that? Or was it just extra likely to be mentioned because it's a genuinely helpful book - either because the AI learned over time that it was (very good!), someone just wanted to recommend it to more people to help them (~good). I worry that the "intelligent conversation" or "wow look at the agent go" can give us very poor epistemics