Magical thinking

What is magic? I'd define it as the feeling we get when we see an outcome without understanding the mechanism behind it. People are often accused of "magical thinking," which usually means a tendency to fixate on outcomes while ignoring the underlying mechanisms, and we generally assume that understanding the mechanism is what leads to better decisions.

 

But to borrow a line from someone:

Magical thinking, it turns out, is absolutely essential to understanding any emergent system. You have to believe in magic to understand anything truly complex.

I think LLMs are exactly this kind of system.