If you consider the “extended CEO” to include everyone whose knowledge is of importance … surely you’re no longer talking about anything much like simulating a person in any useful sense? How does “simulate the CEO” describe the situation better than “try to do what’s best for the organization” or “follow the official policies and vision-statements of the organization”, for instance?
I think it’s telling that your examples say “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by referring to a foundational set of principles” and not “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by asking what the organization’s most senior person would do”. (Of course many Christians like to ask “what would Jesus do?” but I think that is importantly different from asking what the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly, etc., would do.)
I think most Googlers, and most Christians, are like you: they are much more likely to try to resolve a question by asking “what do the ‘ten things’ say?” or “how does this fit with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount[1]?” than by asking “what would Sundar Pichai say?” or “what would Pope Francis say?”. And I think those are quite different sorts of question, and when they give the same answer it’s much more “because the boss is following the principles” than “because the principles are an encoding of how the boss’s brain works”.
[1] I am guessing that you mean that rather than just the Beatitudes, which don’t offer that much in the way of practical guidance, and where they do there’s generally more detail in the rest of the SotM—e.g., maybe “blessed are the meek” tells you something about what to do, but not as much as the I-think-related “turn the other cheek” and “carry the load an extra mile” and so forth do.
(Disclaimer: I have never worked at Google; I was a pretty serious Christian for many years but have not been any sort of Christian for more than a decade.)
If you consider the “extended CEO” to include everyone whose knowledge is of importance … surely you’re no longer talking about anything much like simulating a person in any useful sense? How does “simulate the CEO” describe the situation better than “try to do what’s best for the organization” or “follow the official policies and vision-statements of the organization”, for instance?
I think it’s telling that your examples say “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by referring to a foundational set of principles” and not “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by asking what the organization’s most senior person would do”. (Of course many Christians like to ask “what would Jesus do?” but I think that is importantly different from asking what the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly, etc., would do.)
I think most Googlers, and most Christians, are like you: they are much more likely to try to resolve a question by asking “what do the ‘ten things’ say?” or “how does this fit with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount[1]?” than by asking “what would Sundar Pichai say?” or “what would Pope Francis say?”. And I think those are quite different sorts of question, and when they give the same answer it’s much more “because the boss is following the principles” than “because the principles are an encoding of how the boss’s brain works”.
[1] I am guessing that you mean that rather than just the Beatitudes, which don’t offer that much in the way of practical guidance, and where they do there’s generally more detail in the rest of the SotM—e.g., maybe “blessed are the meek” tells you something about what to do, but not as much as the I-think-related “turn the other cheek” and “carry the load an extra mile” and so forth do.
(Disclaimer: I have never worked at Google; I was a pretty serious Christian for many years but have not been any sort of Christian for more than a decade.)