I don't get it. First, how is it "better for you" to take the earring off, if "the wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family?"

Second, apparently some people do choose to take the earring off at some point, because the story refers to "the testimony of all living wearers." So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.

Not seeing the problem here.

The problem is not that it limits the wearer's free will. On the contrary, it allows the wearer to exercise it way too effectively on the premise that the wearer already knows exactly who he is and what he needs.

How would you feel with a procedure in which your brain was scooped out like ice cream from a bowl, and replaced with circuits that would do a better job of your life for you?

> So it does not, in fact, appear to usurp, subvert or replace the wearer's free will.

Ok, the ice cream scooping happens slowly. At what point of atrophy, do you think it becomes easier to revert to what is left of it?

You still have free will, in the strictest sense. But you are increasingly dependent, so have lost optionality that no amount of will can replace.

Is your life story about what flows to you? Or about what challenges come to you, that you, yourself meet and overcome?

EDIT: But you are also right - given discipline - the right thing to do is always leverage every piece of good advice we can get. From bot or earring. By always (1) first coming up with our own best plan, so we have a basis to recognize and appreciate the insights in better ideas (2) get the best possible feedback on that plan, the good and the bad, and then (3) with what we learned from that, attempt a better plan, and repeat until getting somewhere better that either initial plan, for all the looping. Then still learn from any failure or success. And do not go down the slippery slope of delegating unimportant questions, like choices of ice cream flavors! This is how I get the most from my AI advisors. To work and train myself faster and harder!

It stands to reason that the people who took the earring off were less happy and made worse decisions than the people who kept it on for the rest of their lives.

So then ask yourself: why did they take it off? Pondering the implications of that question is the entire point of this short story.

How can you know it’s not the earring giving those testimonies? The story doesn’t say whether they were wearing the earring while being interviewed, but given that wearing it for a long time wastes away your neocortex and turns you into a flesh puppet, I don’t think long-term users are even able to speak on their own anymore.

OTOH people who are still themselves, in the early stages of the takeover, will certainly tell you of their own volition that the earring always seems to be right. Wearing it is presumably highly addictive.

Because, if you don't take it off, "you" will cease to exist and instead gradually become the rich and much beloved appendage of an earring.

The entire story is about the definition of self imho.

An exclusive choice between maintaining free will and agency vs. achieving some definition of “success” makes for a good story. You’d think the choice would be blindingly obvious, and yet turns out it isn’t (or to some it is blindingly obvious in the opposite direction).