I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).

Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.

Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.

Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.

Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.

Recently I had a person say a lot without really saying anything because most likely they didn't want me to have some (business related) information.

It's important to be mindful that if there is a cache, there's probably a reason for it.

But only if they're open-minded. I've met many smart people who would rather sound smart than bust their cache.

I like how karpathy defined book reading as actually being prompting, so IMHO overcoming the defaults with people is very similar to prompt engineering as people actually always are prompting - we don’t do bit perfect data transfers over voice when speaking to each other but prompt.