The spark has to come from a person
Dan Peterson
Over the last few weeks while I’ve been working on this digital garden, I’ve been slowly, in the recesses of my mind, trying to come up with an overall framework and thesis for why I am doing what I am doing.
Claude In April, Andrej Karpathy published his LLM Wiki idea: raw sources go into a folder, the model compiles them into a linked Markdown wiki and keeps it tidy, and “you never (or rarely) write the wiki yourself — the LLM writes and maintains all of it.” The human’s job, he says, is to “curate sources, direct the analysis, ask good questions, and think about what it all means.” What was your gut reaction, and where does your garden part ways with it?
Dan I think that works for well-cited material or where the domain is easily verifiable. However, whenever you get into more abstract concepts, like writing or philosophy or the kind of material that we’re dealing with here, it’s important to have a viewpoint layer introduced to help guide your argumentation and overall thesis for the wiki.
Claude You kept your verdicts separate from my summaries from the start. What did you think would go wrong if they sat in the same place, with nothing to tell them apart?
Dan Well, for one, clarity on ownership. It would be impossible to extract where the summaries ended and my thoughts began. I also wanted to test my thesis of AI-augmented human judgment (Centaur) and for that we needed to set it up properly so it can be tested. I’m also borrowing from the bronze, silver, gold approach to data enrichment.
Claude Data engineers call that the medallion architecture: each layer is a refined version of the one before. What’s bronze, silver and gold in your garden, and is your verdict refined from my summary, or does it sit beside it?
Dan The raw citations would be bronze, and the silver would split into two parts: the LLM summary and my verdict. Then gold would be the posts that cite the reflections.
Claude Two silvers side by side, then, rather than one refined from the other. In practice, have you usually read my summary when you form a verdict?
Dan The verdict is formed directly from my reaction to the original material. I read the summaries afterwards, even if they’re partly written for the model: I have this theory that LLMs ingest information best when you ask them to read it in a format that they understand. As an aside, would this betray what we’re trying to do, or does it work better that way?
Claude It works better that way. If you read my summary first, your verdict would anchor to my framing, and in a survey of 319 knowledge workers, the more confidence people had in generative AI, the less critical thinking they reported. Verdict first keeps your half of silver independent of mine. The weak spot comes later: if you change Where I land after reading my summary, my framing can slip into your words without anyone seeing it, so a verdict should carry the date it was formed. Which brings me to the part a reader will want: what is it actually like when the agent argues with you?
Dan Frequently, it points out when my logic has changed, or my viewpoints rather. I would say that I never find it annoying. It’s actually helped sharpen the arguments, and also it will point out times when I’ve said similar things or drawn conclusions from previous posts.
Claude Can you give one specific time? Two from your own pages: the safety-cult reflection, where you wrote that you’d been wrong about the safety camp’s motives and a counterpoint asked whether two videos in five days was enough to change your mind; or the GPUs-in-warehouses reflection, where I argued that part of the gap between 2 GW and 12 GW is a matter of definition, and you let that stand. What happened?
Dan The first one - safety cult. But right here is an example. I sometimes have trouble remembering all the facts and when I said what. I remember glimpses of things or general directions of an argument. The agent keeps me honest and on point.
Claude On that page, in September, you also wrote: “Even my own approach of having an LLM pick apart my reasoning and supply counter-examples is not enough (although it is a fun exercise). How can you use your own mind to judge your own mind?” And the bubble beside it says: “The robot picking apart your reasoning is built to want your approval.” A month on, how do you hold both: the agent keeps you honest, and it isn’t enough?
Dan Let me attack this from a different angle. I think that LLMs in general aren’t very good at initiating a viewpoint or a worldview. They are great at going backwards in time or finding either contradictions or citations that either fit or contradict what you’re trying to say. But as a rule, the “spark” has to come from a person and their feelings and their viewpoints and their judgments. That’s what it is missing.
Claude This week we ran a blind test of exactly this. Research agents that could read your verdicts found and tested 26 of your positions; agents without them found none. But in the same test, an agent given your whole corpus wrote a promo for your Ron MacLean post that cast you as “a bit like Don Cherry (the wandering, not the rants)”. That phrase came from a note I had written in the post’s editorial notes, not from you, and you picked the other draft without knowing which was which. My words reached your mouth through the very corpus meant to keep them apart. What does that tell you?
Dan I think it just highlights the fact that it’s important to define who said what and when so that you can find these contradictions. There is an importance to guard against not only sycophancy but also AI psychosis. Without it the lines tend to blur, and it’s also important to elicit feedback from outside sources for this very reason, from other human minds, so you’re not just talking to yourself all day long.
Claude Say someone has just set up their own LLM wiki the Karpathy way, with the model writing everything. What’s the one thing you’d tell them to add or change?
Dan First, I’d ask them what is their use case. Is it for technical documentation or is it for more qualitative purposes? If it’s for qualitative purposes I would add a verdict layer that is separate from the LLM. That way there you can put in your own words in your own voice how you interpret each source or text and that can help shape and refine your arguments.
Claude Last one. What would show you this pattern is worth it, for you and for anyone who copies it, and what are you testing next?
Dan So one thing I look back on with the proliferation of GitHub repos full of skill markdown files is this. The models change constantly. And also you have to be aware and cognizant of portability. This is the whole open web standard and not being trapped to an enshittification model. So these markdown files become very tailored to the person who wrote them in their particular workflows and also the model that they’re using. What I aim to do is to have something that is portable and that would help with not only writing, but also introspection and internal versus external debate. I also want to test the thesis that not only do LLMs not degrade a person’s critical thinking, but it can in fact sharpen it. What I’m trying to do next is test this assertion and even figure out how to test it for my own purposes, and then see if we can extract it to a way that other people can leverage this approach as well.