generational-change
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Three important steps in my maturation process
opinion
7 min read
Thomas Dullien reflects on three beliefs he says reshaped his thinking as he reached middle age, following his father’s recent death and a move to a company with a younger workforce. First, he argues that people should examine the incentives behind their own beliefs and actions rather than accept self-flattering narratives. Drawing on his past possession of software zero-days, he says the social consequences of disclosing, fixing, or using vulnerabilities are difficult to predict and that individuals often overestimate their influence on history. Second, Dullien argues that the single-cause determinism familiar from software debugging rarely applies outside tightly controlled systems. Physical computers can behave unpredictably under conditions including temperature, voltage, electromagnetic interference, wear, and rapid accesses to adjacent DRAM rows. He says real-world events are generally probabilistic and multicausal, and suggests that random bit flips during AI inference could complicate guarantees about model alignment. He also characterizes the scientific method as deliberately conservative in accepting claims, leaving some true propositions potentially unproven. Third, Dullien contends that the Western separation of reason from emotion is culturally constructed. He says emotional valuation and bodily signals provide information that supports decision-making, and argues that decisions should integrate emotions with rational deliberation rather than attempt to eliminate them.