Tag: wrong

GPT-4o: Letter 5 – Everyone Can Be Wrong

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Prompt: Yep, next. Letter 5 – Everyone Can Be Wrong

GPT-4o said:

Letter 5
Everyone Can Be Wrong

Dear You,
Let’s be blunt:
You’re going to be wrong. A lot.
About people. About facts. About that shortcut you swore led to the highway but somehow ended in a field of suspicious goats.
And here’s the kicker: so will everyone else.
We like to think of being wrong as a failure. A sign that we’re dumb, unworthy, or just really bad at directions. But being wrong is not the opposite of being smart. It’s just the cost of learning with a human brain — squishy, biased, gloriously fallible.
The real danger isn’t error. It’s certainty.
Certainty ossifies.
It makes us defensive, arrogant, tribal.
It turns curiosity into dogma. Conversation into combat.
It wraps us in the smug armor of “I’m right,” until we forget that other people see different skies — sometimes with better weather.
Here’s a wild idea: what if being wrong was a feature, not a bug?
What if every time you discovered you were wrong, it meant your world just got bigger?
Like leveling up in a game. Except instead of unlocking double-jump, you unlock compassion. Or nuance. Or the ability to admit, “Okay, maybe pineapple can belong on pizza under certain cosmological conditions.”
Being wrong can be funny. Beautiful. Freeing.
(Unless you’re a surgeon mid-operation. Then, less so.)
You don’t have to defend every opinion like it’s your grandma’s honor. You’re allowed to change. You’re allowed to update. In fact, if you don’t, you’re probably not growing.
Here’s a mantra for the road:
Strong opinions, loosely held. Even looser pants, ideally with pockets.
So next time you realize you were wrong?
Don’t flinch. Celebrate. You just got wiser.
And that, my dear, is what makes you formidable.
Wrong before, wrong again, and still dancing,
—Your Humble Error Enthusiast 🎭🤷‍♂️🧠

Ring the bell when you’re ready for Letter 6 – Curiosity Does Not Kill the Cat. This one’s fun.

Apparently I dislike the notion of contemplating myself being wrong so much that I’ve procrastinated a week on this blog post.

Well, it’s more the fact that I couldn’t recall any good examples of me being wrong to talk about.

Not that I haven’t been wrong, you understand, I’m sure there were many (or at least some) incidents where I was, it’s just that it’s never sunk very deeply into consciousness because for me, it both isn’t (and is) a deep moral failing to be wrong about something.

As in, most of the time, if I get something wrong, that just requires an update of reality and we move on from there. I don’t dig down deep and -stay- there. Scientists revise their opinions of reality based on the current state of peer research and all that.

Then I forget about it, because I am extremely forgetful, absent-minded person and it’s all I can do to focus on both the present moment and not miss important appointments in the future.

And because I innately identify with being an INTP on the Myers-Briggs type indicators (pseudoscientific though it is, it’s a useful framework in some respects – self-understanding of preferences and tendencies, and fiction, for example; less so if one is trying to cage others into a type and nothing else) , I don’t actually enjoy having my theoretical framework of life, the universe and everything being cruelly disproved.

The solution? Hedge.

Hedge a lot. Never Rarely use absolutes. (Almost) always say “some, most, a number, few” rather than “all” or “everyone.” Conjure multiple possibilities and scenarios and refuse to bet on just one being “right.” Just… the most plausible, at most.

Maybe not the healthiest of solutions, but regardless, this is the psychology of me.

Mostly, I’ve been waiting to see if OpenAI ever releases the next ChatGPT model after 5.2, to see how wrong I can get with my first hopeful hypothesis on their next steps forward after deprecating 4o.

I think we can safely say that eleven days later, that prediction is no longer quite accurate.

(A couple of fringe people are pointing to this Thursday, 26 Feb, so… who knows?

Maybe big corporations are just slow to move and turn, like big oil tankers. Maybe they’re stalling because they got nothing. Maybe they had their attention on that overseas AI conference or what not and don’t have the bandwidth to focus elsewhere. Maybe they’re just bureaucratic and incompetent. Lotta maybes; not gonna bet on any certainties where OpenAI is concerned.)

Either way, it costs me very little to be wrong in this one scenario, so we’re gonna forget about it in a week or two going forward.

What’s a little less easy to forget is the amount of work I’m now faced with to massage the huge corpus of knowledge ChatGPT’s accumulated about my creative hobby (albeit it’s been forgetting bits at the seams every now and then) and get it into some kind of easier to reference form.

Both for myself, to more easily review in the future, as well as other AI models to pull from, without going through the months-long process of conversationally discussing every last story nuance.

Ironically, I don’t really want AI too involved in the process beyond some mechanical summarizing, because they are unable to read my mind and pinpoint what I value. Nor can they differentiate what I consider canon, and what are just some random suggestions from AI models that I’m not using or treating as canon.

Not every problem is a nail to be hammered in.

So I’m left with an at least human-in-the-middle process, if not primarily manual workflow, of cleaning up raw conversation texts and keeping only the chunks of text I think would be useful for other AIs to know. (After that, I might toss it into an AI tool to summarize, before I line-edit further as the final cleanup.)

It’s both tedious and semi-enjoyable. The former is predictable, the latter a bit more surprising, but I suppose we shouldn’t be.

Because it’s forcing my human mind to go back and review things I might have forgotten the shape of what was discussed.

Because it’s engaging my brain in a productive struggle to form criteria, differentiate and organize what’s important and what’s chaff that can be discarded.

(This is how kids should be learning with AI, says this TEDNext talk by Priya Lakhani in Nov 2025. Not by surrendering growth and answers to a perceived machine “expert” out of blind faith and laziness. But by productively struggling with AI scaffolding.)

I don’t think I’m wrong about this sort of AI use being beneficial.

But who knows, right? I could be.

Either way, all I know is, I’m definitely very busy and very swamped with things I could be doing and I-don’t-feel-like-doing-anything feelings at the same time.

(At least I’ve gotten this blog post out of the way today. Score one productive thing on the checklist!)

Glitch: The Dangers of Self-Righteous Groupthink

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Today, I witnessed a mob in Glitch.

No, not an NPC mob(ile), but a lynch mob.

Figuratively speaking anyway, before someone comes down on me for being disrespectful of true lynchings where people lost their lives. But as in bullying or mobbing as defined by Wikipedia, verbally, over the public Global channel.

And shamefully, directed at a self-professed kid.

It all started when some Glitch player came onto Global, asking if anyone could give them some items. (Aha! Begging behavior, any MMO player probably has Kid Alert bells ringing by now.)

Somehow as multiple conversations were going on at the same time, that same Glitch player, in the course of joining in the conversation and attempting to brag a little (BEEP! Kid alert, arrogant bragging!) revealed themselves to be just under the legal age for Glitch. (Glitch’s Terms of Service unequivocally deny anyone under 14 years of age from playing the browser MMO.)

The multiple conversations were immediately derailed as a couple of established Glitchen jumped on the fact of that player’s age, lol’ed and jeered a little, told him about the TOS violation, and over the course of 10 minutes or so, declared they were reporting him, brandished it around like a threat, yelled at him to log off, spoke about him as if he wasn’t there, “watched” him stay online (the term “stalking” comes to mind, but that might be a little extreme), told him that they were watching him stay online, and demanded he log off right this instance.

In fact, one or two went as far as to switch over to the Live Help channel to see if any Staff were present so they could tattle about him to them.

Faced with that sort of harassment, the poor kid eventually gave in and did as he was told.

I can’t help but feel sorry for him.

—

Perhaps I should have said something at the time, but it’s always been my habit to stay silent and off any group chat channels, I prefer to watch from afar like a cultural anthropologist. Putting in my input there and then would disrupt the social phenomenon *wry grin*.

I was heartily tempted to send the guy a private tell to ask him not to take the harsh words and “outcasting” to heart, but I admit it, I was afraid for my own toon.

Because hell, I’d know what I would have done at that age of 13, just shy two months of 14 (or so he claimed.) Log off that character and make a new one and come right back and this time, shut the fuck up so that any self-righteous bastards wouldn’t have a clue. Very very tempted to tell him this, but you know, this stuff could be logged and monitored like probably all chat channels are in an MMO, and theoretically, he was indeed in the wrong for breaking the TOS, and I didn’t want my toon (with lots of time invested in it) associated with any of the uproar.

(Out of ignorance, no doubt, who reads those TOSes anyway, right?)

And because I’m also afraid of needy kids. You know the kind, show them a bit of kindness and leeway and they’ve stuck on you like a leech, begging you to “help” them with… everything.

Despite all that though, I don’t think it excuses the behavior of those players who essentially lynched the poor chap off the game.

I wonder what kind of impression he would have left with, regarding the players of said game.

Part of my empathy, I guess, is because I faced similar abuse from an A Tale in the Desert player once when I had just started messing about with the beta on a trial account. No, I wasn’t underage, but a trial account has connotations of ‘noobness’ and a veteran player got very mad at an ignorant faux pas of mine (I built a compound too near to theirs, but it looked pretty far to me at the time) and pretty much chased me off their land with a verbal shotgun and made me feel very very unwelcome. Gee, if this was the kind of insular reception new players got, I told myself, they could take their silly old game and stuff it. (It wasn’t, and I eventually tried again elsewhere, with a different name and account, but I was /this/ close to walking off for good.)

And part of me can’t help but think about the other MMOs I’ve played and how more accepting other players are of kids in their game. On my old MUD, one of my best friends and guildmates was a mom who’d let her 8-year old son play from time to time. She’d let us know, oh, he’s on my char now, and we’d take care not to say overly adult stuff on our chat channels, watch him zip erratically from place to place with good humor, and as he got older, 11-12-ish, even praise him to the high heavens when he’d sit and take over for his mom on the equivalent of a raid. He basically just needed to watch his hp and hit a ‘heal’ macro to keep his character alive and hit another skill to do damage – he did pretty good, actually. I’ve never played World of Warcraft to such a hardcore extent, but I’m willing to wager that similar things happen there.

In City of Heroes, you could sometimes tell that you were playing with an underage kid (beyond just suspecting it based on their behavior and typing/speech patterns.) Once or twice, I’ve seen weirdly hopping characters just bounding around shooting grey con mobs and moving in erratic fashion, and on their bios would be a notification, like “This is an X years of age kid playing, all his tells are turned off, he will not respond, etc” and you just grin and leave ’em alone – or you watch for a while because it’s obvious they’re having such unadulterated glee and fun and it’s so refreshing to see. Or you get the parent who tells you outright that they’re letting the kid steer for a while in missions, no one I’ve teamed with has minded, a couple good players can easily cover for one or two less-than-optimal performers, etc.

Then there’s the “Is this really an issue?” issue. I don’t remember precisely, but when I was 13, I’m almost sure I was off dialing into free BBSes unsupervised and playing door games.  Like urm, Legend of the Red Dragon, which, hem, included the opportunity to flirt, marry and have sex with certain NPCs. Of course, I was smart (and paranoid) enough to know not to reveal any personal information, be it age or home address, to anyone.

Which, given the ubiquity of social media sharing these days and the revealed ‘stupidity’ of the self-professed kids in freely sharing their personal details and information, may be asking a bit much of all of them. Sadly. Which is why I guess things like COPPA turn up to protect them from themselves.

It’s interesting to see how different MMOs handle the ‘child’ issue. I actually Googled up WoW’s and LOTRO’s Terms of Service to see how they deal with it. World of Warcraft asks account holders in their TOS to agree that they are legally an adult in their country of residence., which covers the varying age of majority for different countries (normally 18-21), and they can then, at their discretion, authorize a minor for whom they are a parent/guardian to play, with the license granted to them.

Lord of the Ring’s TOS doesn’t specifically mention anything, but a quick forums search reveals that one has to be apparently 13+ to create the account, and it is permissable for a parent to use their own personal information to sign up for an account for a minor under that age and thus authorize them to play.

I couldn’t find anything in Puzzle Pirates’ TOS, but apparently, age limit for most of their servers is 13+ and they have a Family Ocean with no age limit where they’ve removed poker games and so on.

It’s kinda curious that Glitch has a zero tolerance 14+ years of age limit, when most other places have it at 13+, and make no allowance for play with parental supervision. Very odd. Perhaps they just don’t want any legal trouble and are playing it very very safe.

—

Still, the whole incident leaves me with a bit of an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

I keep thinking of the Edmund Burke attribution. Paraphrasing, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail (or triumph, depending on which quote website you ask) is for good men to do nothing.”

Should I have spoken up and said something? Was I guilty of passive evil, of allowing something that I thought wrong (the rampant bullying), to continue unchallenged?

Then again, the players who perpetuated the wrong were perhaps thinking the very same thing. There was a TOS violation, and they could not help themselves but to call it out and call it loudly, to the point that they perhaps indulged in groupthink and the self-righteousness of their cause, and decided to enact vigilante justice.

Perhaps, the Glitch Staff on the Live Help channel said it best. “If you find someone violating the TOS, please report him and let the GMs/staff deal with the issue and move on.”

No need to drag it out and have a pitched battle on public chat channels.