## Metadata - Author: [[Elizabeth Lopatto]] - Full Title:: Silicon Valley Has Forgotten What Normal People Want - Category:: #🗞️Articles - URL:: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/nft-metaverse-ai-weirdos - Read date:: [[2026-04-21]] ## Highlights > One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq5k5t4r16mftss6qnbg8rh)) > I tried to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, not least because he seemed frustrated that I didn’t see things exactly as he did — a new behavior and likely a symptom of LLM overuse. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq5mh9dr7kzaz9shtgfxxkc)) > discovering something that’s new to you is exciting — ask anyone who listened to me yell about the joys of European (higher-fat) butter — but you can’t take for granted that something that’s new to you is new to *everyone.* These things have in common a certain incuriosity that I have found endemic among a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship. Perhaps they have been so siloed that they did not realize their “discovery” was well -known elsewhere, or perhaps their self-conception is that they are the smartest, and if they don’t know something, no one knows it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq5nvwmebma53srv7m2ps2h)) > When I think I have observed something important, my first impulse is to go to a library, or Wikipedia, or a person who I think may be knowledgeable, and see what else has been observed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq5sf3jsa99ef01pp5rb3qg)) [[Adanismo]]: > requires you to take for granted that other people are smart, that smart people have always existed, and that very little in the human experience is new. That requires, you know, intellectual humility — and a willingness to think about other people’s experiences. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq5t599a6w03q2re08h85yr)) > how else do you plan to continue to have people generate high-quality information? No one has solved this problem. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq60qe7qk5yvph0cvxdz2gj)) > AI music apps, which are predicated on the idea that there are people in the world who *want* to make music but simply haven’t taken the time to learn how to play an instrument. There are likely very few of those people! Musicians aren’t bogarting creativity — they are people who enjoy making music. The rest of us just enjoy listening, which is an end in itself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq61qsdbttc5tjdmh92mcav)) > the self-publishing market is rampant with AI slop, not because people are desperately trying to express themselves, but because it is easy to trick other people into buying slop on Amazon. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq625wkgkyvdcctvcmjftqh)) > How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kpq62ztcbj5sb9p3cjdsq56n))