Turbo-confabulator

In the past month, I've witnessed several people fall prey to AI-assisted delusions of grandeur, a.k.a. AI-psychosis. What they have in common is that the person was debating another person and using AI to find support for their own arguments. Speaking for myself, I sought win some philosophical arguments, one about the mind-body problem and another about Ayn Rand objectivism. I got puffed up with so much "you're so right", but fortunately, I noticed it before I could got carried away. Some others didn't fare so well in my estimation.

One talked herself into believing she could communicate with the aliens on 3I/Atlas via so-called scalar waves. When I politely asked her to design an experimental instrument to detect scalar waves as a baby step toward proving that certain people can detect them unassisted, she gave me a list of electronic components that kind of sounded plausible unless you had a bit of electrical engineering background. For example, she said to use a Toshiba amplifier as a "saw filter". She also mentioned a commercial off-the-shelf signal generator by model number, as if that particular one is special. She responded to my retorts of vagueness and inconsistency with more bulleted lists, as she (and LLMs) are wont to do. Then the big reveal: she copied and pasted an AI chat transcript of her asking the LLM how she can reduce the distortion of the spiritual channel emergent from the chat, ostensibly so that she can answer me better. Apparently, LLMs are the new Ouija board.

Another person got into a debate with someone about the definition and etiology of addiction. In this case, both parties used LLMs, lobbing AI-assisted essays at each other until one side dropped a 2000-word one, which the other side refused to put in the mental energy to read. Understandably so, because if one is not going to put in the effort to write something, why should another person put in the effort to try to (in)validate it? One side called out the other side for incorrect usage of LLMs. The other side called them out for ignoring the most current scientific literature on the topic. Both are probably fair arguments, but the points were lost because the AIs polarized them to the point they were emotionally incapable of listening to the other side.

A third case of an argument tainted with AI is a couple arguing about their respective needs. One party used the LLM for validation that the other was being one-sided with her ultimatums. You can bet your bottom dollar she has a similar complaint about him that, were she to post her dialogue to the chat bot, she would get the same, "You're absolutely right!"

It bothers me that people are so quick to believe these turbo-confabulators [YouTube]. Don't they know these LLMs were subject to reinforcement-learned obsequiousness and dark patterns [Wikipedia] to keep the user engaged? I thought we learned from the decade plus of online echo-chambers and social media scandals, but I guess we're in a perpetual arms race against our robot overlords.

Politically Incorrect Comedy

The fact that Chappelle is getting a lot of flack from critics indicates a growing divide between the rational and the emotional-intuitive sides of the collective psyche. We’re trying to break bad habits by going cold turkey but end up punishing ourselves when muscle-memory inadvertently jerks us back into our well-worn prejudices. To move forward without tearing ourselves apart, we must honor the irrational, for it has its own internally consistent reasons.

We laugh at racist and sexist jokes because it releases the tension held fast by idealism intolerant of imperfection. Fighting fascism with thought policing perpetuates the authoritarianism upon which the fascism is founded. Like gladiatorial sport did for Rome, politically incorrect comedy can vent primitive drives toward disorder.

The danger of edgy comedy normalizing bigotry used to be offset by the diversity of the crowd attending the same event. Comics in the 80s and early 90s could nonchalantly ask the audience, “How many of you are liberals? How about conservative?” and the crowd would respond without splitting into camps and booing the other. A joke was understood to be a joke and not a slippery slope into death camps or toxic-something culture. This mistrust of a vital venting opportunity for the other side becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as accusations engender defensiveness and eventually preemptive offense.

Polarization will not go away with both sides becoming more authoritarian. As the disequilibrium mounts in culture, we need release valves, and I think acknowledging our prejudices with levity can loosen us up.

Further exploration

You Can't Hit Unsend: How A Social Media Scandal Unfolded At Harvard [npr.org]: Podcast episode about some students' racist and sexist jokes costing them their admission to Harvard, despite the fact that they were often making fun of their own class.

Punishment feedback loop

Xenophobe: You hate because you have been fatally shot. Your body rose from the dead but dead in spirit and seeking revenge. You spread the message of hate through your words and actions, inciting fear and motivating further hate. It doesn't matter that they hate you; at least you have made them feel the wrath that you feel.

Anti-xenophobe: You hate because you have been fatally shot. You seek revenge and call it justice, not caring if the killers die in the process. Dehumanizing the enemy, you provoke him to dehumanize you. It doesn't matter that hate is multiplied in the world; at least you have made them feel the brunt of justice.

Ex-convict: Released from jail having been taught long months or years of "justice", you go out into the world to spread the good word about this so-called justice. They thought punishment will make you good, so you think punishment will make everyone else good, too.

Replace the two characters with whatever us-versus-them you want. It's a positive feedback loop that fools the players into thinking it's a negative feedback loop. Each party expects the other party to give in, but instead, the conflict just escalates.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. I see the results of hate, whatever sneaky form it takes, and I turn away from spreading it. I teach you peace by being peaceful despite having been apparently tortured. I say "apparent" because torture requires conscious intent, and my violators were not conscious.

Be Beautiful

What you do is all for yourself.
Even guilt and self-punishment is done in service to self as a means to cleanse evil.
Leave yourself in good hands instead.
Seek not the company of haters; they come only at your calling.
People are multidimensional and holographic reflections of you, so be as beautiful as the world you want to see.

Moral Decision Making and Happiness

Video about how we value ill-gotten gains.

People are more willing to shock themselves for the same amount of money than to shock someone else. In fact, you have to pay them twice as much to shock someone else. People are nice.

Now tell them that the money won't go to them but to a charity. Suddenly, they want to shock themselves more. And they're also even more willing to shock others! Shocking: People can be extra mean if they think they're doing good.

Molly Crockett, your breadth of knowledge in the area of behavioral economics, if I may stretch the term a little, is wide. The humility through which you approach the study of how humans try, fail, and succeed to be good makes me trust your work more, knowing you are observant for more and better information. This is an important topic that could use rational minds to help clarify so we can find a more effective path to happiness for all.

Reason in Means and Ends

Preferences form the basis for how we see the world. At the most fundamental level, organisms can be seen as preference computers. They interpret sensory stimuli as attractive or aversive, gravitating toward the former. Opinions are more or less complex preferences. They add nuance to our movements toward and away from things and situations. Without them, we might as well be the simplest automata like a neutrino careening into the abyss.

From a utilitarian perspective, some basic (e.g., “biological”) preferences drive a complex of preferences and opinions, which in turn engages logical reasoning to maximize the return on caloric investment. This, I believe, is the relationship of reason to opinion. Reason itself is only a means to an end and cannot be an end in itself. Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem cast doubt onto the ability of formal systems like arithmetic and Aristotelean logic to perfectly undergird an epistemology (and, I would venture to say, an ethic).

However, I do see value in cleaning the lens, again from a utilitarian standpoint. To use a computer metaphor, a computer program or algorithm is opinionated in that it drives toward a certain goal, which the programmer decides. However, the steps in its procedures should be strictly deterministic and free from arbitrary preferences. Hence, we should work to enhance the reliability of the mechanical aspects of information processing and to remove the aberrations of the lens through which we see to work toward our goals.

Simulacra and Meaninglessness

I thought the language in A Course in Miracles is too verbose and archaic. Then I started reading Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. Now that is complicated. I got frustrated reading passages like:

...the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the system of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. (p. 2)

So much ado about nothingness, literally. Exasperated, I pick up ACIM to a random page like a magic 8-ball. The first words that confront me are:

Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation? If He had, it has no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true. The Holy Spirit looks upon the world as with one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its aim, but must be in accord with it. For only if its aim could change with every situation could each one be open to interpretation which is different every time you think of it. (T.30.VII.1)