Truth is Toxic to Most Companies
Epistemic Status: reflecting on naivety
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Engineers often pride themselves at their ability to ascertain truth or at least get asymptotically closer to it.
However, in most companies, capital T Truth is toxic and the whole system is set up to avoid it.
Think about a company being acquired by a larger one. First order of business is to cut costs and increase margin.
This can't be done without knowing the Truth of which organizations are cost centers and which one are profit centers because all of them present themselves as critical profit centers. Even those that seem to obviously be cost centers often have high specific domain knowledge of critical systems and can use this as leverage to create symbiotic relationships with the rest of the company.
Now realize that every company is like this even without an explicit antagonistic relationship.
Powerful individuals end up in information bubbles not because they want to, but because of all the smart and motivated people around them acting in ways to maximize and preserve the existing status quo.
A naive engineer blindly believes in the Truth as an ultimate virtue and that all problems can be solved if it were delivered to someone with enough influence or formal authority.
But imagine an engineer presenting to the executives a manifesto of:
1. There is no way to reverse entropy
2. We're all going to die
3. Our core revenue streams will be disrupted by AI in 6 months and all our existing plans and motions are just performative ritual.
This of course is presented to the 6 executives leading the new AI initiatives at the company.
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Truth is like radioactive ore. It requires an extreme level of expertise to extract net positive energy from it while dealing with its externalities.
The truth of "intricately carved silicon & linear algebra seems to create intelligence" can only be extracted profitably by certain experts.
In these companies truth is not a toxic asset because there's an entire system set up to process (most importantly, convincing VCs of this for money). Even interns are encouraged to debate with senior executives.
However in most companies this is not the case. They are setup to digest a different kind of older truth, one that is no longer true.
In most companies, undiluted truth is toxic.
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Notice how this issue occurs recursively. Every company is pretending to be at the cutting edge of AI, pretending they can profit from truth when most are just trying to not die to truth. They are willing to fork out margin-destroying costs in order to maintain relevance.