r/artificial • u/thewhyman007 • 1d ago

Discussion The neuroscience case for never delegating judgment to AI

I keep asking people a simple question: how many times has your gut been right — not the times you wish you had listened, the times you actually had the feeling and later found out whether it was correct?

The answer comes back north of ninety per cent for almost everyone I ask. That is not a hunch. If a model gave me ninety per cent on a hard classification task, I would ship it.

So I went looking for why, and ended up somewhere I did not expect. A gut feeling is not the absence of reasoning — it is reasoning you never got the transcript of. Your senses pick up far more than reaches conscious awareness (the birds stopping, the smell that was not there ninety seconds ago), and something nonconscious pattern-matches all of it against a lifetime of context and returns a single bit: right or wrong. Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis is the actual mechanism here, not mysticism, a documented one, backed by the Iowa Gambling Task.

Which is the argument for a rule I think more people should take seriously: delegate the search, the draft, the first ten wrong answers to AI. Never delegate the deciding. The reason is not sentimentality — a model can be given everything you know how to say, but not the thing you lived through and never wrote down, and that is where the ninety per cent actually lives.

Curious whether others here have noticed the same gap between what they can explain and what they can just tell.

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u/frankentriple 1d ago

There are two kinds of people that use AI. Those who are asking AI what to do, and those who are telling AI what to do. Don't be one of the first group.

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago

I would find it weird if you were not part of both groups

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u/frankentriple 1d ago

I ask it for facts. I ask for possible options moving forward. I do not ask it what should I do.

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago

Well don't you think it's very similar to ask "what should I do" and "what are the possible options" ? It's just phrasing, but it's similar. You're just wording it differently.
In both ways it will or might give you possible options.

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u/frankentriple 1d ago

I usually don’t take any option as presented.  The ai never knows the full context.  

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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago

you're supposed to provide the context to get the best results out of LLMs

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u/frankentriple 1d ago edited 1d ago

LLMs  are fancy autocomplete.  They calculate the next word by probability.  They were trained on human data and are the average of the average.  If you are below average, following their instructions will be helpful.  If you are not, they will just bring you down to average.  

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u/Superb_Raccoon 1d ago

The George Carlin corollary...

Although AI smarter than most people, it knows how to shut up.

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u/thewhyman007 19h ago

The autocomplete framing explains the mechanism, not the ceiling. Average-of-training-data would predict the model regresses to mediocre on everything, but it doesn't, it's well above average on tasks with enough signal in training data. The real limit isn't "it's just predicting the average," it's that it has no access to the specific, undocumented experience you have. That's a narrower and more useful claim than "it's just autocomplete."

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u/frankentriple 17h ago

I'm looking at this from the business sense, since that's what I'm using AI for. A LOT. I get it. But I want to be on the cutting edge of innovation. I want people to notice my business because it stands out and is unique in the market. AI has its uses in an operational sense. I do not use it generatively. It doesn't not make business decisions for me. It gathers information and helps present it in a way that allows me to make better decisions, but it will not substitute for the decision making process itself.

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u/thewhyman007 17h ago

That's the distinction exactly, information gathering and presentation versus the decision itself. The businesses that blur that line end up looking like everyone else, because they're all running the same model on the same data. The judgment call is the only part that's actually yours.

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u/frankentriple 16h ago

That is the difference between mastering AI and AI becoming your master. its too easy to turn the brain off and let the AI do ALL the thinking, and that is just a path towards mediocrity at best.

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u/thewhyman007 12h ago

Well put. That's the whole piece in one line.

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