# Before LLM Psychosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis

> A studio executive has no beliefs
> 
> That's the way of a studio system
> 
> We've bowed to every rear of all the studio chiefs
> 
> And you can bet your ass we've kissed 'em
> 
> Even the birds in the Hollywood hills
> 
> Know the secret to our success
> 
> It's those magical words that pay the bills
> 
> Yes, yes, yes, and yes!
> 
> *   [“Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking”, from SMASH](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0p-UROLesc)

So there’s this thing where someone talks to a large language model (LLM), and the LLM agrees with all of their ideas, tells them they’re brilliant, and generally gives positive feedback on everything they say. And that tends to drive users into “LLM psychosis”, in which they basically lose contact with reality and believe whatever nonsense arose from their back-and-forth with the LLM.

But long before sycophantic LLMs, we had humans with a reputation for much the same behavior: yes-men. The middle managers, advisors, and the like who surround CEOs and presidents and others at the top of large organizations. Given the similarity between yes-men and sycophantic LLMs, one might hypothesize a phenomenon analogous to LLM psychosis: yes-man psychosis.

The story: a CEO/president/etc, over the years, tends to retain the people who agree with them and say nice things, and tends to let go the people who disagree with them and say unkind things (just as many LLM users have a revealed preference for sycophantic models). Like a sycophantic LLM, the yes-men agree with everything the CEO/president says, tell them they’re brilliant, and generally give positive feedback on everything they say. And that tends to drive the CEO/president into “yes-man psychosis”, in which they basically lose contact with reality and believe whatever nonsense arose from their back-and-forth with the yes-men.

A central example: on my current models, yes-man psychosis was why Putin thought it was a good idea to invade Ukraine. Before the invasion, I remember reading e.g. RAND’s commentary (among others), which was basically “invading Ukraine would be peak idiocy, so presumably this is all sabre-rattling for diplomatic purposes”. Alas, in hindsight it seems Putin legitimately thought the invasion would be over in a few days, and Western powers wouldn’t do much about it. After all, the bureaucratic and advisory structures around him told him what he wanted to hear: that Russia’s military advantage would be utterly conclusive, Western leaders had no willingness to help, presumably nobody even mentioned the issues of endgame/exit strategy, etc.

The phenomenon of yes-man psychosis predates LLMs by millenia, so of course people have talked about it before, even if we didn’t have quite so crisp a name for it. I think I picked up the concept from John Boyd, the air force colonel who invented the term “OODA loop”. In Boyd’s frame, yes-man psychosis is a major way in which organizations-as-a-whole, or the people leading them, become de-facto unable to observe the world. Their perceptions are filtered through the yes-men, and the yes-men distort reality to the point where the leader can’t see it at all. (Think of a CEO surrounded by graphs and charts showing optimistic and coherent but basically false statistics about their company’s performance.) Without the ability to observe reality, the organization or its leaders cannot take different actions in response to different environment states. This, in Boyd’s frame, is a “dead” organization; like most dead matter and unlike living organisms, it just does its thing without particularly adjusting its responses to its environment in order to achieve particular outcomes.

![](https://i.imgur.com/C1Qi3Af.png)

Imagine everything around you was like this graph all the time. (From T-Mobile's 2016 annual report. Hint: that is not a graph of those numbers.)

Like rocks and logs, a dead organization can hang around for a long time if it’s not disturbed. But sooner or later the environment will change in such a way that the organization will collapse if it doesn’t do something different. And when that happens, the writing is on the wall for the organization.

I usually think of this as the default lifecycle of large organizations: they find a niche, grow for a while, then the leaders have the resources and time to select the people around them. And most leaders lack the awareness or discipline to avoid surrounding themselves with yes-men, so over time they lose the ability to accurately perceive their environment, and the organization “dies” in Boyd’s sense. Then the dead organization hangs around for some time - maybe a long time if it’s in a niche which doesn’t change much, or maybe a short time if it’s in a rapidly-changing environment. But it’s de-facto dead, just following its trajectory, and eventually it will collapse.