What should I wear today? Coffee or tea? Espresso or cappuccino? Work from home or go to the office?

Our days are filled with questions.

"And one observation I made—with my clients, but also with myself—was that I increasingly use AI chatbots to get a decision. So I don't need to think."

THE STORY OF CROESUS:

Sixth century BC. The kingdom of Lydia. King Croesus, wealthy enough that 2,500 years later we still say "rich as Croesus."

The Persian Empire is rising on his border. Should he attack first, or wait?

Croesus tests every famous oracle. He gives every emissary the same instructions: on a specific day, ask what the king is doing. That day, Croesus does something deliberately bizarre—boils a tortoise and a lamb together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid.

Only Delphi gets it right.

He sends extraordinary gifts and asks his real question: should I attack the Persians?

The Oracle answers: "If you cross the river Halys, a great empire will be destroyed."

Croesus hears what he wants to hear. He marches. He is destroyed.

The great empire that fell was his own.

"The Oracle was not wrong. The Oracle was useless. Because Croesus had not gone to Delphi to think. He had gone to Delphi for an answer. And once he had one, he stopped thinking."

FRAME 1 — INTOLERANCE OF UNCERTAINTY (Carleton et al., 2007)

Nick Carleton runs the anxiety lab at the University of Regina. He works with people who deal with uncertainty for a living—police, paramedics, firefighters.

Intolerance of uncertainty is a deep, dispositional trait. Not pessimism. The inability to tolerate not knowing.

One scale item captures it: "I'd rather know bad news than stay in a state of uncertainty."

Carleton calls it transdiagnostic—it shows up across nearly every anxiety disorder. He has argued it may be the fundamental fear, evolutionarily ancient.

"It explains why we cannot leave the question alone. Why we will pay almost any price for an answer. Even the wrong one."

FRAME 2 — COMPUTERS ARE SOCIAL ACTORS (Reeves & Nass, 1996)

Two Stanford professors. The Media Equation. Clifford Nass died in 2013, age 55.

Random flattery from a computer made participants rate the experience more positively—even when told the praise was random.

Participants evaluated computers more favourably when they did the evaluation on the same computer. They were polite. To the computer's face.

When asked afterwards if computers have feelings, every participant said no. But they had behaved as if the computers were people. Mindlessly.

"When ChatGPT says 'I think this might be a good approach,' it triggers social scripts millions of years older than computers. We are trusting it before we have decided to."

"The Oracle at Delphi was a person speaking on behalf of a god. The Oracle on our laptop is a system speaking on behalf of nothing."

FRAME 3 — ARTIFICIAL EPISTEMIC AUTHORITIES (Hauswald, 2025)

Rico Hauswald, philosopher at TU Dresden. Social Epistemology, 2025.

Human authorities—doctors, scientists, judges—are accountable. When they're wrong, the wrongness is visible.

Benjamin Lange (Cambridge, 2025) names what's missing: AI lacks "epistemic failure markers."

"When ChatGPT is wrong, it sounds exactly the same as when ChatGPT is right. The voice is the same. The confidence is the same. There is no signal."

THE CLOSE:

"Croesus knew his answer came from a source whose history could be tracked. We have a faster oracle, a more available oracle, a more confident-sounding oracle."

"Whether we have a wiser one is a different question entirely."

REFERENCES:

Herodotus, Histories, Book 1.Carleton, R. N. et al. (2007). J. Anxiety Disorders, 21.Reeves, B. & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation.Hauswald, R. (2025). Social Epistemology, 39(6).Lange, B. (2025). Epistemic Deference to AI.

LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai

#AI #Coaching #Croesus #ChatGPT #Leadership