this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.
The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.