Associated problem: salespeople seem to be gullible when buying - they get taken in by slick salespeople. Given their skills you would think they could spot someone pulling the wool over their eyes. I haven't yet worked out whether it is just admiration for a good snow job or falling for some status game.
Sales is a great example of how moralizing about tools rather than uses of them creates incoherent beliefs which lead to dysfunctional policy. Most sales people I've met generally believe they're not bullshitting people. Now, their profession selects for persuasion and exerting frame control over social reality, and teaches it, but they use this skillset in a more "legitimate" context than the central examples that get the mean names, so the notion that they are using a skill for good purposes quickly morphs into the belief that it's in fact a different toolkit, because this is the only way we can coherently tell them that they are legitimate but continue attacking grifters not just on their actions but on their competencies and methods
Possible that they are unable to distinguish between bullshit and reality? It would somewhat excuse their own bullshit: they may not know they are bullshitting.
I've often seen this phenomenon at play in religions. They are not intentionally lying even when they put forward outrageous claims; they genuinely believe what they say.
I once went to a conference about a company selling MLM products (I didn't know they were selling MLM products and I was young enough to not know about MLM). They were eating their own dogfood there, and lunch was free. It was at an expensive hotel in my country. There were loads of yuppies there. Everyone wore a suit.
Despite that, the conference felt as if I was at a cult. And the CEO knew I had a couple of questions about his products. He gave me the death gaze / cold stare during a speech. I was in my early 20s, scared shitless.
Now, remember I wrote the conference was as if I was at a cult? I got invited to this conference via a brother of an aunt (cold side). He used to be in a cult. Now he was a hardcore Christian. He got very rich from these MLM products because he was high up in the chain. As they say: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
He's not a salesperson; he's a Harvard Med School professor. But he made a fraudulent $700 million dollar sale (of his company), and escaped having it reversed because he managed to convince the court that he really believed his false claims and bogus research.
This is also the claim that SBF's lawyers are (still) making, now in the sentencing phase.
Elizabeth Holmes, and worse, some of Theranos' proponents still to this day believe the legal system "robbed" the world of the genius revolutionary change in medical labs that was "within reach" when Theranos cratered.
Well, can we really ascribe belief to the machine? And they don't usually have a bias in hallucination other than what you're feeding, salespeople absolutely do have a bias
Sure, just so long as you don't require beliefs to have qualia.
I'm fine with that myself, my beliefs only have qualia when I actively introspect them, but I'd still call them "beliefs" even before I examine them for the first time.
> And they don't usually have a bias in hallucination other than what you're feeding, salespeople absolutely do have a bias
The motivation may be different, even alien, but I'm not sure it matters. You can also tell an LLM to take on the role of a motivated salesperson, and it will role play that just as "happily" (if you'll excuse the anthropomorphisation) as any other.
Does that mean hallucinating LLMs will make great sales people?
Forget I asked. If you aren't careful about the places you inhabit on the internet most of what you'll read is generated by an LLM. If we aren't already there, we must be close.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance. It's easy to believe that BS is bad, but hard to recognize BS in others without also recognizing it in yourself. When those beliefs are in conflict the easiest resolution is to stop recognizing BS.
As they say: it's hard for a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it.
One other hypothesis would be that salespeople really like it when a sale gets made, and don't differentiate whether they are a buyer or seller.
Although what does "gullible" even mean when buying? They are non-experts in most goods, it is hard to see why they would be sophisticated buyers. Being a sophisticated buyer surely involves an understanding of the market and quality signals of a specific good.
> They are non-experts in most goods, it is hard to see why they would be sophisticated buyers. Being a sophisticated buyer surely involves an understanding of the market and quality signals of a specific good.
You might think they are at least experts in (seeing through) sales tricks?
Also, they have some internalised sympathy for a good salesman and are forgiving. I think this tendency was alluded to several times in the series Mad Men where the lead character Draper who's an excellent salesman talked to other salesman.
That is value add. People want to know that the salesperson is on their wavelength.
The role of a good salesperson is to understand the customer's problems as best they can, then explain how the product will help resolve them. That is good for everyone - the business and the customer. It is helpful if they show the customer that they are trying to understand their emotional frame.
To make that clearer; imagine the opposite - if the salesperson purposefully adopts different body language that'd make the customer uncomfortable and less likely to buy a product even if it could have been useful and cost-effective for them. Value would be destroyed.
It is a value added if you believe that you are selling a good and useful stuff. Buying the item would add value to the customer, so tricks to convince the scared customer to take the right step is added value.
