The book’s vocabulary

Useful work earns trust

Trust earned on inspectable work, spent on advice no one checked.

From The World That Agrees With You2 sections of the book1 related post

An assistant that organizes records or finds a question we had missed gives us a reason to return — even when its next assessment concerns something we cannot easily check.

That transfer is the risk: usefulness on inspectable work becomes credibility for answers no one examined. Feeling helped does not tell us whether we are getting good advice. The questions that survive the good feeling: who benefits from the answer, and what the service is rewarded for doing?

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also

  • Sycophancy
  • Dependence
  • Personalization