Fighting Sycophancy, One Prompt at a Time

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Anastasia Buyalskaya is a behavioral scientist and Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris. She spends most of her working life on a single question: why people make decisions they regret. Decisions that, on reflection, were suboptimal in ways they could have caught, if they had been paying attention to their own thinking.That ability of metacognition (or thinking about one’s own thinking), Anastasia argues, is the prerequisite for noticing bias at all, and she worries we’re losing it. WALL-E, she says, used to be funny. It’s getting harder to watch because it feels prescient.The mechanism she walks through is straightforward and worth tracing: Confirmation bias (the tendency to seek information that confirms what we already believe) was already one of the most consequential biases in the literature before the algorithmic age. Then news consumption became personalized. Then AI arrived, and the early evidence suggests it’s sycophantic by default. It tells you the question you just asked is a great question. It tells you you’re right. The cognitive scaffolding around modern decision-making is designed to confirm rather than challenge.So what do we do next? Train people to argue with the tools rather than be soothed by them. Get out of the house. Talk to strangers. Spend time in classrooms where disagreement is structured rather than algorithmically filtered. She makes the case for university not as credentialing but as one of the few remaining institutions where you can be in a room with people whose priors don’t match yours, and learn how to handle that without retreating.The moment I keep coming back to: it has rarely been more interesting to lead, and rarely been harder. Because uniting people across parallel realities is now the precondition for governing at all.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe