We were working on translations for Arabic and in the spec it said to use "Arabic numerals" for numbers. Our PM said that "according to ChatGPT that means we need to use Arabic script numbers, not Arabic numerals".

It took a lot of back-and-forths with her to convince her that the numbers she uses every day are "Arabic numerals". Even the author of the spec could barely convince her -- it took a meeting with the Arabic translators (several different ones) to finally do it. Think about that for a minute. People won't believe subject matter experts over an LLM.

We're cooked.

Honestly I think we're just becoming more aware of this way of thinking. It's certainly exacerbated it now that everyone has "an expert" in their pocket.

It's no different than conspiracy theorists. We saw a lot more with the rise in access to the internet. Not because they didn't put in work to find answers to their questions, but because they don't know how to properly evaluate things and because they think that if they're wrong then it's a (very) bad thing.

But the same thing happens with tons of topics, and it's way more socially acceptable. Look how everyone has strong opinions on topics like climate, rockets, nuclear, immigration, and all that. The problem isn't having opinions or thoughts, but the strength of them compared to the level of expertise. How many people think they're experts after a few YouTube videos or just reading the intro to the wiki page?

Your PM is no different. The only difference is the things they believed in, not the way they formed beliefs. But they still had strong feelings about something they didn't know much about. It became "their expert" vs "your expert" rather than "oh, thanks for letting me know". And that's the underlying problem. It's terrifying to see how common it is. But I think it also leads to a (partial) solution. At least a first step. But then again, domain experts typically have strong self doubt. It's a feature, not a bug, but I'm not sure how many people are willing to be comfortable with being uncomfortable

Kind of a tangent but that did make me curious about how numbers are written in Arabic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals

The architect should have required Hindu numbers. Same result, but even more confusion.

Man this is maddening.

And the worst part is, these people don't even use the flagship thinking models, they use the default fast ones.