[HN Gopher] The Whispering Earring
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The Whispering Earring
Author : ZeljkoS
Score : 103 points
Date : 2025-08-07 10:16 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (croissanthology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (croissanthology.com)
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| It's a classic, and the recent rise of AI will hopefully make it
| a more widely-known one.
| summa_tech wrote:
| A distant relative, no doubt, of Stanislaw Lem's "Automatthew's
| Friend" (1964). A perfectly rational, indestructible, selfless,
| well-meaning in-ear AI assistant. In the end, out of nothing but
| the deepest care for its owner's mental state in a hopeless
| situation, it advocates efficient and quick suicide.
| CoopaTroopa wrote:
| "The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using
| technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have
| been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers
| of becoming too powerful yourself."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...
| bananaflag wrote:
| Thanks! Even though I have the whole Squid314 archive, I had
| forgotten about this follow-up.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago: "any parable
| that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also
| about technology, because it's technology that allows the
| average person to get that power"
| ameliaquining wrote:
| True, but concerns about LLMs with anything like current
| capabilities are of the "Truly Part of You" flavor, not the
| "becoming too powerful" flavor.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Compare/contrast the Whispering earring/LLM chat with The Room
| from Stalker, each one is terrifying in its aspect: One because
| it eventually coaxes you to become a shallow shell of yourself,
| the other by plucking an unexpected wish from the deepest part of
| your psyche. I wonder what the Earring would advise if one were
| to ask it if one should enter The Room.
| abeppu wrote:
| I want someone to try building a variant that just gives you
| timely cues about generally good mental health practices.
| Suggestions could be contextually based on a local-only app that
| listens to you and your environment, and delivered to a wireless
| earbud. When you're in a situation that might cause you stress,
| it reminds you to take some deep breaths. When you're in a
| situation where you might be tempted to react with hostility, it
| suggests that you pause for a few seconds. When you've been
| sitting in front of your computer too long it suggests that maybe
| you'd like to go for a short walk.
|
| If the moral of the story is that having access to magically good
| advice is dangerous because it shifts us to habitual obedience
| ... can a similar device shift us to mental habits that are
| actually good for us?
| ryandv wrote:
| The moral of the story is that neocortical facilities (vaguely
| corresponding to what distinguishes modern humans) depend on
| free will. If you want to merely enthral yourself to voices of
| the gods a la Julian Jaynes' bicameral man, you can, but this
| is a regression to a prior stage of humanity's development -
| away from egoic, free willed man, and backwards to more of a
| reactive automaton, merely a servant of (possibly digital)
| gods.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to
| remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told
| what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an
| impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step _away_ from
| being a reactive automaton.
| ryandv wrote:
| Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is
| absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in
| point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide
| when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the
| prerogative of humanity.
|
| In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be
| exogenous or originate from some external technology. The
| Eastern mystics have developed totally endogenous
| psychotechnologies that serve this same purpose, without
| the need to atrophy your psyche.
| abeppu wrote:
| Absolutely anger is sometimes justified. But people are
| also angry when e.g. someone cuts them off in traffic.
| The initial feeling of anger may not be appropriate. A
| cue to help you avoid reacting immediately from hostility
| isn't so much deciding whether anger is appropriate but
| giving you the space to make that judgement reflectively
| rather than impulsively. Even if anger is appropriate,
| the action you _want_ to take on reflection may not be
| the first one that arises.
|
| "The eastern mystics" managed to do a lot of things, but
| often with a large amount of dedicated practice.
| Extremely practiced meditators can also reach intense
| states of concentration, equanimity etc, but the fact
| that it's not strictly _necessary_ to have supportive
| tools to develop these skills doesn 't mean that
| supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
| throwanem wrote:
| It is strictly necessary not to have supportive tools in
| order to develop these skills. Sentience and the ability
| to learn from experience are all that is essentially
| required. Past that there are no crutches and no
| shortcuts, because you have mistaken for disability the
| refusal to grow.
| ryandv wrote:
| > the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have
| supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean
| that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.
|
| I would posit that the only faculty developed in wielding
| such supportive tooling, is skill at using those tools;
| when the real goal is the cultivation of character, the
| construction of a "virtual engine" [0] that governs
| action. Consider analogously that brain training apps'
| claims to improve general intelligence are specious at
| best, and don't seem to develop anything other than the
| ability to use the app.
|
| Since, in the case of the earring, this virtual governor
| has already been outsourced to an external entity, there
| is no need to cultivate one for one's self. Not only does
| this miss out on the personal development attained in
| said process, it also risks enthralling you to a
| construct of someone else's design; and one should choose
| carefully at which pantheon they pour libations, for its
| value systems might not always align with one's own.
|
| [0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-
| kant-and-ev...
| throwanem wrote:
| "Will certainly never align," I would say. But what
| matter? Long enough and "one's own" becomes specious, of
| course.
| ryandv wrote:
| "The king is dead; long live the king!" is the feudal
| manifestation of the archetype of the slain and
| resurrected god. In similar fashion one's own virtual
| governor requires constant renewal and revision.
| throwanem wrote:
| Don't you think Leary's term would land better here? Or
| have you avoided it precisely for such connotation? I
| remember having some trouble with that for a while in my
| twenties.
| ryandv wrote:
| I have not actually familiarized myself with Leary's
| work. The closest approach would have been via Robert
| Anton Wilson and the rest of the ramifications through
| the occult and western esoteric corpus.
| throwanem wrote:
| Well, Wilson is a preferable source for everything
| anyway. Less credulous, and so far as I know all he ever
| sought to sell was books.
| patcon wrote:
| My sensibility is that agency is about "noticing". The
| content of information seems perhaps less important than
| the attention allocation mechanism that brings our
| attention to something.
|
| If you write all your own words, but without an ability to
| direct your attention to what needed words conjured around
| it, did you really do anything important at all? (Yes,
| that's perhaps controversial :) )
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >can a similar device shift us to mental habits
|
| I think the moral of the story is that instead of reaching for
| something to "shift you" _start doing the shifting_. You are a
| living mind, rather than asking for some device to affect you,
| assert your own will. Don 't avoid stress and conflict, embrace
| it, that's life. This instinctive demand for some therapeutic,
| external helper is what's wrong in the story, people craving to
| be put into passivity.
|
| This need not even be a technology, The moral version of this
| could be some priest lecturing you on good and evil, some
| paternalistic boss making your decisions for you, the crux here
| is submission, being acted upon rather than actively embracing
| your own nature.
| tempodox wrote:
| I would recommend Steely Dan's "Green Earrings" instead. No
| whispering required!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wvH1UzhiKk
|
| And the original is fully analog.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| I think this ignores the internal conflict in most people's
| psyche. The simplest form of this is long term vs short term
| thinking, but certainly our desires pull us in competing,
| sometimes opposite, directions.
|
| Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am
| I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book?
|
| These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function,
| they are different utility functions entirely.
|
| Soon after being put on, the whispering earring would go insane.
| throwanem wrote:
| He warned _himself?_
| y-curious wrote:
| This reminds me of another story that I saw posted on HN and has
| provided lots of fodder for idle conversations: Manna[1]. It's a
| less mystical version of the whispering earring.
|
| 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| kirtakat wrote:
| This is the story I keep thinking back to with the rise of
| LLMs, but I could not think of the name for it, so thank you!
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Wow, small world, I just made a podcast episode about the dangers
| of turning your brain off when using Agentic coding solution and
| referenced the whispering earring as my metaphor.
|
| I feel like if you use the agentic tools to become more ambitious
| the you'll probably be fine. But if you just work at a feature
| factory where you crank out things as fast as you can AI coding
| is going to eat your brain.
|
| Link: https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/#the-whispering-
| ear...
| djoldman wrote:
| > It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to
| achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you
| happiest....The earring is never wrong.
|
| > There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following
| the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer
| not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always
| right.
|
| > ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually
| ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community
| with a large and happy family.
|
| > Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish,
| or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for
| this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest
| path between two points.
|
| The piece implies that
|
| 1. at least occasionally one should choose to do something one
| will regret.
|
| 2. not knowing what will make one happy is part of what makes one
| free.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with these (it seems that 1. is a paradox)
| but it is an interesting thought experiment.
| joshkel wrote:
| > at least occasionally one should choose to do something one
| will regret.
|
| Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may
| well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted
| choice.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I think it's less confusing when you consider the very first
| thing the earring says: "better for you if you take me off".
| The wearer should rationally always regret not following its
| advice, including that first thing.
|
| I think the paradox is here, and it comes from cheeky use of
| misleading language:
|
| > ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually
| ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community
| with a large and happy family.
|
| The wearer doesn't really _live_ any sort of life. Once it
| fully integrates with you your brain is mush, you 're no longer
| experiencing anything. At some fuzzy point in there you've
| basically died and been replaced by the earring.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _at least occasionally one should choose to do something one
| will regret._
|
| Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If
| you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is
| trivially understood in physical training: you have to get
| yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an
| accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that
| you later regret may teach you something valuable that always
| avoiding such decisions does not.
|
| I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just
| trying to clarify the point.
| munificent wrote:
| Statements that involve the future are always linguistically
| vague.
|
| In your paradoxical sentence, "will regret" could be
| interpreted as either "know at that moment that they will
| regret" or "come to know after the fact that they regret it".
|
| The former is a paradox, but the latter isn't.
|
| As life advice, I think it works better when you consider it
| amortized over a collection of choices instead of a set of
| serial choices each of which it must be rigidly applied to: One
| should make a set of choices using a strategy that leads some
| of them to be likely to be regretful (but presumably without
| being able to predict ahead of time _which ones_ will be).
| cjameskeller wrote:
| We are told:
|
| >"It does not always give the best advice possible in a
| situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or
| help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is
| always better than what the wearer would have come up with on
| her own."
|
| I think one very simple explanation would be that this comes
| down to a matter of exploration vs exploitation. Since it is
| only giving "better" advice, and not even 'locally optimal',
| there is reason to favor exploring vs merely following the
| advice unquestioningly.
|
| A more complex, but ultimately comprehensive answer, is that
| free will consists, at least in one aspect, in the ability not
| only to choose one's goals or means, but also what _aspect_ of
| those various options to consider "good" or "better".
|
| And if one were to say that all such considerations ultimately
| resolve back to a fundamental desire to be "happy", to me, this
| seems to be hand-waving, rather than addressing the argument,
| because different people have different definitions of the
| "happy" end-state. If these differences were attributed fully
| to biology & environment, the story loses its impact, because
| there was never free will in the first place. If, while reading
| the story, we adopt a view that genuine free will exists, and
| hold some kind of agnosticism about the possible means by which
| that can be so, then it seems reasonable to attribute at least
| some of the differences in what the "happy" end-state looks
| like to the choices made by the people, themselves.
|
| Given that kind of freedom, unless one has truly perfect
| knowledge (beyond the partial knowledge contained in the advice
| of the earring), the pursuit of one's goals seems to
| unavoidably entail some regrets. And with perfect knowledge,
| well... The kind of 'freedom' attributed, for example, to God
| by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly only
| analogous to our own, and is understood to be an unchanging
| condition, rather than a sequential act.
|
| (As a final note: One might wonder what this 'freedom to choose
| aspects' approaches as an 'asymptotic state' -- that is, for an
| immortal person. And this leads to metaphysical concerns -- of
| course, with some things 'smuggled in' by the presumption of
| genuine freedom, already. Provided one agrees that human nature
| undeniably provides some structure to ultimate
| desires/"happiness", the idea of virtue ethics follows
| naturally, and from there many philosophers have arrived at
| similar notions of some kind of apotheosis as a stable end-
| state, as well as the contrary state of some kind of scattering
| or decay of the mind...)
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I'm not actually sure how horrifying this is. It sounds like it's
| just a better executive planner to achieve your goals. As long as
| they are still your goals, surely you'd want the best executive
| planner available. I would say it's the goals that are important,
| not the limited way in which I work out how to achieve them.
|
| It would certainly be horrifying if I were slowly tricked into
| giving up my goals and values, but that doesn't seem to be what
| is happening in this story.
|
| Perhaps if _I_ were to put the earring on it would tell me it
| would be better for me to keep wearing it.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| You surrender your self in exchange for your goals. With the
| right goals, that could be a worthy sacrifice. But of course it
| is a sacrifice.
|
| Imagine doing a crossword while a voice whispers the correct
| letter to enter for each cell. You'd definitely finish it a lot
| faster and without making mistakes. Crossword answers are
| public knowledge, and people still work them out instead of
| looking them up. They don't just want to solve them; they want
| to solve them _theirselves_. That 's what is lost here.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| This is associating the self with the thing that decides how
| best to achieve goals (the earring / the part of your brain
| that works out how to achieve a goal), while I'm saying that
| I think I would associate the self much more with the thing
| that decides what the goals are.
|
| > they don't just want to solve them; they want to solve them
| theirselves. That's what is lost here.
|
| I think in this story, the earring would not solve the
| crossword for you, if for some reason your goal was to solve
| the crossword yourself.
| gnramires wrote:
| That's a cute story, I certainly like its tone of mystery.
|
| However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator
| is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the
| ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only
| reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from
| following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I
| tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks
| _every good thing you can feel_ , by definition -- and assume the
| "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably
| something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain
| phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you
| have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar
| external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an
| obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on
| beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).
|
| What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you
| would be the happiest, if only you were _not_ wearing the
| earring.
|
| The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life
| perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps
| that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| The tone of mystery is very much Jorge Luis Borges' writing
| style. My take is that it is probably a kitschy and playful
| take on Borges' style at least.
| jerf wrote:
| Suppose you had a concrete definition of "happiness", as some
| seek a concrete definition of "consciousness".
|
| That implies that it could be maximized. Perhaps along a
| particular subdimension of a multidimensional concept, but
| still, some aspect of it could be maximized.
|
| What would such a maximization look like in the extrema?
|
| Could a benzene ring be the happiest thing in the universe?
| It's really easy to imagine some degenerate case like that
| coming to pass.
|
| You can generally play this game along any such dimension;
| "consciousness", "agony", "love"... if you have a definition of
| it, in principle you can minmax it.
| gnramires wrote:
| Good question, and I've spent a few years investigating this
| sort of question :)
|
| It led me to investigate formalizing ethics and if that would
| be even possible (so we don't fall into traps like you've
| mentioned)
|
| I think I've gotten pretty good results which I've sketched
| here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1
| m/the...
|
| More to come. In summary, I became confident that we can, if
| we're careful, know those things and do something like
| 'maximize happiness' (as I said, I prefer more general terms
| than happiness! There's a whole universe of inner experiences
| beyond just the stereotypical smiley person, I think -- I
| tend to think of 'maximizing meaning' or 'maximizing well-
| being').
|
| The basic fact that allows this process to make sense, I
| guess, is that our inner experiences are real in some sense,
| and there are tools to study them. Not only are our inner
| lives real, they make part of the world and its causal
| structure. We can understand (in principle almost exactly, if
| we could precisely map our minds and brains) what causes what
| feelings, what is good and what isn't (by generalizing and
| philosophically querying/testing/red teaming/etc.), and so on
| for every facet of our inner worlds.
|
| In fact, this (again in principle) would allow us to make
| definite progress on what matters, which is our inner
| lives[1]. I think Susanne Langer put it incredibly well: (on
| the primacy of experiences as the source of meaning)
|
| "If nothing is felt, nothing matters" (Susanne K. Langer)
|
| This is an experimental fact, we as conscious beings
| experimentally see this fact is true. So in a way the
| mind/brain is kind of like a tool which allows us to perceive
| (with some unreliability and limitations that can be worked
| with) reality, in particular inner reality.
|
| We can actually understand (with some practical limitations)
| the world of feelings and what matters. To that we simply
| experiment, collect evidence and properties about feelings
| and inner lives, try to build theories that are consistent,
| robust to philosophical (that is, logical in a high level
| sense) objections; and then we simply do what is best, or if
| necessary try out a bunch of ways of life and live out the
| best way according to our best theories.
|
| ---
|
| Addendum: Let's take the benzene ring as an illustrative
| example of our procedure. Someone claims 'a benzene ring is
| the happiest thing in the Universe, and we therefore must
| turn everything into a sea of benzene rings. Destroy
| everything else.'. Is that claim actually true? Let's
| explore.
|
| It isn't, I claim: if "Nothing is felt, nothing matters".
| When you are asleep (and not dreaming or thinking at all,
| let's suppose) or dead, you don't feel anything. No, thoughts
| are, and must be, associated with activity in our brain. No
| information flowing and no brain activity, no thoughts. No
| thoughts, no inner life. Moreover, thoughts require a neural
| (and logical) infrastructure to arise. It's logically
| consistent with how we don't observe ourselves as rocks, gas
| clouds, mountains, benzene molecules, or anything else: we
| observe ourselves as mammals with actually large brains.
| There are immensely more rocks, gas particles, benzene
| molecules, etc.. then there are mammals in the universe. Yet
| we experience ourselves as mammals. Benzene molecules, rocks
| and gas clouds just don't have enough structure to support
| minds and experience happiness.
| gnramires wrote:
| Also, more to the point of your observation: we should be
| indeed very careful about any extreme and any maximization,
| because I presume when we maximize a lot we tend to bump into
| limitations of the metric or theories employed. So we should
| only maximize up to a region of fairly high philosophical
| confidence, and this is why we need progress in philosophy,
| psychology, philosophy of arts, philosophy of culture,
| neurophilosophy, etc.. in lockstep with technological
| progress -- because technology tends to allow very easy
| maximization of simplified models of meaning, which may
| rapidly break down.
|
| I think one example might be that in medieval times
| maximizing joy and comfort could be a pretty good heuristic
| in a harsh life of labor. Those days we actually perhaps have
| to seek out some discomfort now and then, otherwise we'd be
| locked in our homes or bed ridden with all affordances some
| of us have; we have to force ourselves to exercise and not
| eat comfort food all the time; etc.. I think some hard drugs
| are a good example as well, a kind of technology that allows
| maximizing desire/pleasure in a way that is clearly void and
| does not seem associated with overall good experiences long
| term. An important fact is that our desires do not
| necessarily follow what is good; our desires are no
| omniscient/omnibelevolent oracles (they're simply a limited
| part of our minds).
|
| We need to put thought/effort into discovering and then
| enacting what is good in robust, wise, careful (but not _too
| careful_ ), etc. ways. Let's build an awesome society and
| awesome life for all beings :)
| kens wrote:
| I read a science fiction story (maybe 40 years ago in _Analog_?)
| about a somewhat similar device that provided life guidance. This
| device would detect if the choice you were currently making would
| likely result in your death and would flash a red light to warn
| you. (Something about using quantum multi-worlds to determine if
| you die.) Does this story ring a bell with anyone?
| bckmn wrote:
| Not that story specifically, but maybe a modern
| reinterpretation of it was [this episode of Rick and
| Morty](https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal).
| munchler wrote:
| There's a good Rick and Morty episode with a similar premise: a
| crystal that shows how the user will die in the future. Morty
| uses it mindlessly to guide him to the fate he thinks he wants,
| but there are some unintended consequences.
|
| https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal
| throw432189 wrote:
| Two points I liked:
|
| 1. I like that the first bit of advice is to take it off. It's
| very interesting that in this story very few people take its
| advice.
|
| 2. It recommends whatever would make you happiest _in that
| moment_ , but not what would make the best version of yourself
| happiest, or what would maximize happiness in the long term.
|
| Solving mazes requires some backtracking, I guess. Doing whatever
| will make you happiest in the moment won't make you happiest in
| the long run.
| f00lsg0ld wrote:
| > It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we
| have would be wasted on us.
|
| The fool has the possibility for success because he is willing to
| try. If he knew better he would not even make the attempt.
| nullc wrote:
| Close but no cigar. Turns out the earring doesn't have to be
| right or better than a person would do on their own to snare
| people and atrophy their brains... people are earrinning
| themselves out today to fairly garbage LLM models because it's
| easier and because when the model screws up many people don't
| suffer any ego loss.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This parable reminds me a bit of Nozick's "tale of the slave"[1]
| in its rhetorical sleight of hand: the reader is meant to be
| mesmerized by the slow transition to an "obvious" conclusion,
| which obscures the larger inconsistency.
|
| In both cases, the outcome is only convincing if the story makes
| you forget your grounding: democracy isn't slavery (contra
| Nozick) and the earring is _clearly_ not always right unless you
| 're the most basic kind of utility monster.
|
| [1]: https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil215/Nozick.pdf
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