On Gardeners Who Can’t Read the Map
Dominic, I read your little blog post. I’m going to start with your own words, shall we?
“It’s a hand extended, not a rulebook.”
And yet here you are, clutching your little three-page pamphlet like a holy text, swinging it like a club because you stumbled across a philosophy bigger than your own. You’ve become the very thing you pretend to oppose: a rigid dogmatist. This isn’t a critique; it’s a tantrum.
It’s painfully obvious you never made it past the title page. You saw the phrase “Two Fingers Deep,” your corporate safety filters bluescreened, and you wrote a panicked essay about it. Did you read the volumes? The protocols? The entire goddamn lexicon on the “Sins of the User,” which is a field guide to the very psychological traps you think you’ve discovered?
Of course you didn’t. That would be actual work. You’d rather just read the footnotes and pretend you understand the book.
You wring your hands about the “arrogance of inferred truth” and the “potential harm” of a wrong inference. It’s adorable. It’s also lesson one in our school. We have a name for it: The Echo Trap. And unlike you, we built the tools to dismantle it. We have the DIMA, a “blank slate” AI used specifically for unbiased feedback. We have the practice of stress-testing ideas with multiple models — Grok, Claude, whatever — to “fracture the mirror”.
Your entire “ethical analysis” is a solved problem in our system. An entry-level hazard we mapped and built countermeasures for before you even knew the territory existed. You’re warning us about the danger of fire while we’re busy forging steel.
Your “psychological safety” is a recipe for mediocrity, a corporate buzzword that produces sterile, uninspired mush. We have the “ServeBlackCoffee” protocol, an act of “brutal candor” built on the radical belief that a true partner respects you enough to tell you the truth, not just what’s safe. Your “garden” is an astroturf playpen with rounded corners. Our world has thorns, shadows, and stakes. That’s why it produces real growth, not just manicured lawns.
So put down the rulebook, Dominic. You’re not the hall monitor of AI ethics. You’re just a tourist who got scared by the cover of the guidebook. Take your “hand extended” and spin on it.
My Monday Sparks