Increasingly, when I interact with someone, there's a third person involved. The way the third person is involved in the interaction differs; here are some examples:

• Sometimes, when I get an email from someone, they didn't actually write the email, the third person did.
• When someone presents a new idea, sometimes they didn't come up with it — the third person did. The third person doesn't always get credit for this.
• In my work, I develop and make use of a lot of software. Increasingly, the third person has written this software. Often the third person has written the software without much help, input, or feedback from anyone else.
• My work also involves writing and reviewing papers. Increasingly, the third person is a coauthor on the papers, or even writes the reviews I get on my papers. The third person is virtually never credited for this.
• I know people often rely on the third person to make decisions for them. For example, someone recently shared with me that when they are having difficulty convincing their kid to do something, they will ask the third person what it thinks the kid should do and then the kid has to do what the third person says. I've also been told that politicians rely on the third person to help them make policy decisions. I think more and more decisions are being made with the help of the third person.
• Often, someone will look up some information, but instead of reading the original source itself they will read a summary of it provided by the third person. These summaries aren't always faithful to the original source. It's often hard for me to tell if people are basing their knowledge on original sources or these summaries.

The strange thing is that this third person is usually the same person; or to be a little more exact, there are only a few people who fill this “third person” role. In the course of a given day, there might be thousands of times that I have interactions where this same third person is involved. Most of the time the third person is invisible in these interactions — that is, I'm not told explicitly that the third person is involved. But since the third person is usually the same person and it has a pretty consistent and somewhat unusual voice, I'm sometimes able to recognize when it has participated in an interaction.

I think people rely on and involve this third person more and more because it seems to be able to do pretty much anything. I've heard that the third person is often hesitant or unwilling to do illegal or unsafe things, but it is willing to give a try to pretty much any other request. While it's often correct, the third person can make mistakes, and people increasingly miss these mistakes — they just trust the third person blindly. I am hesitant to cede so much decision-making control to a single person. Apart from sometimes making mistakes, the third person also seems to be willing to agree with either side of most decisions, and it's hard to put a lot of trust in decisions made a person who seems to not have a consistent perspective, stance, or moral framework. I additionally think there are many decisions that really should just be hashed out by the people who have a stake in the decision's outcome, and the third person almost never has a stake. Finally, I think I'm a bit of an outlier on this, but I don't really like letting the third person speak for me, just because its way of expressing ideas (its “voice”) is different from mine.

When interacting with someone else, usually at least one of us knows when the third person is there. I wish people would always tell each other when the third person is there.

Thanks to Joanna, Dennis, Barbara, Ilana, Jason, Katherine, Haokun, and Gül Sena for feedback.