Unfortunately, in reaction to: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/depresh-mode/ai-chatbots-destroyed-his-reality-dr-jeremy-heffner-explains-why-he-believed-them/
1 Except Dr. Jeremy Heffner is not just some random asshole, he’s a special boy; a surgeon. You have got to hand it to him, you have got to support the troops, and you have to respect his degree. How come you have got to respect his degree?
2 There’s this goofy idea of “cogitohazards”, ideas which, if you think them, a bad thing happens to you (mostly you feel bad). The classic example is Roko's Basilisk, the idea that if you imagine a super-powerful being that could come into existence, it will in fact come into existence (because of some kind of inevitability that’s never fully elaborated on beyond “scifi assures me evil AI will happen”) and then it will do a bad thing to you, for not having brought it into existence sooner. If you die before day X, it will use its super-powers to make something equivalent to you, and do a bad thing to that, which by stretches of logic so powerful they are only available to the (barely suppressing laughter) greatest minds of the 21st century, is the same thing as having the bad thing done to yourself.
Attentive readers here identify aspects of Harlan Ellison’s I have no mouth and I must scream reduced and distilled down to a meme, but with the added spookiness of real inevitability™. It’s a horror-writer tactic qualitatively similar to Lovecraft’s “it was so spooky, it was literally impossible to describe how spooky it was. Dear reader, the spookiest thing you can imagine? It was like that, but just a little spookier. A smidge more. My god how scared we both must be right now” except with inevitability of horror taking the place of intensity of horror: “And the murderer? Well not only did he get away with it and skulked back into the woods… why in fact he is returning to kill you, the reader! He’s going to do it in exactly fifteen minutes! Completely inevitably! Yes, you, the reader of this sentence! Oh no!” You, the reader, of course have to decide if the arguments presented in this warning are sufficiently persuasive to take seriously and orient your life outside the story according to it. A normal person might begin with the classic onion GWB-era counterpoint of “no it won’t”. Other lines of inquiry might involve requests for more detail, elaborations on the baseless conclusions, or indeed premises of the story. Where are these woods? I live several bus stops away from the nearest wood, and presumably a different victim on the way here would be more expedient. Even simpler, one could choose to entirely disregard the issue as a piece of writing, likely fiction. Were this presented in person, with some vocal urging, one could even take the true enlightened path of saying “fuck off” and not engaging further.
3 Countering such mental manipulation is possible, but presumes factors in both realms of nature and nurture. I’ve argued elsewhere that I think there’s “inarguable values” that people hold that are so basal they defy argumentation1. For nature, a person may have a trusting personality, or contrarily incline towards a predominantly oppositional attitude.
The nurture part includes education, experience, exposure; to argument, to the process of persuasion by rhetoric, and straight up scams. It helps to have seen stage magicians, three card-monte and those websites that put several big DOWNLOAD signs that don't lead to the download but instead popups, to grow inoculated to some of the simpler tricks.
An upbringing absent these countermeasures leaves one susceptible to predations of simple scammers, and chatbots that companies refuse to hardcode the words “you are not a magical YA novel protagonist and also you should not kill yourself” into, despite “boers are being genocided” being added on a whim within 15 minutes of the manchild owning the chatbot desiring it.
None of the characteristics I describe here as innate should be understood to be immutable. Even deeply held beliefs, character traits seemingly integrated since birht, can change and shallower ones often do. Additionally I would be remiss if I didn’t mention drugs. I suspect that “beliefs” and “feelings” are as chemically malleable as any other mental process or state and can be changed, suppressed, heightened, temporarily or long-term, using pharmacopeia. This likely offers one more way of counteracting problems presented by chatbots and other scammers.
4 Common sense has a dual reputation of something we all know and love and want, but we also somehow don’t think it reaches to the lofty heights of “real sciences” such as (barely suppressing laughter) philosophy and psychology. Still, the rare argument from common sense holds a dear place in apocryphal history of philosophy. Proof in the pudding is a valued interjection for defusing overly intellectualized disputes veering into nonsense. In that way it holds a social function that transcends its core discipline. Where redditors list it among fallacies, the enlightened class recognizes it as intercession on behalf of a greater good.
5 I could say a lot about what I think would benefit “education” in “society”, but today I just want to say it would be good to offer education and upbringing that offers exposure to scams, a short history of philosophy (focusing on practical problems and unsolved issues) and a broad explainer on how computers work. 2
6 But, compulsory school education does other things. The function of normal school is to breed conformity. As I’ve argued elsewhere, conformity is the next step after obedience. There’s also a side-path available to the ruling class, who send their children to specialized institutions to nurture sociopathy. Both paths reproduce their respective class. The ruling sociopath class wants sociopath successors, and they also want the workers to remain compliant and placid workers.
7 One subgroup of people that went through academia I hold a lesser grudge against are medical doctors. I genuinely value their contributions to my healthcare, albeit I won’t hide that they managed to conclusively misdiagnose me for 2 months this year before deciding that in fact what two specialists excluded was in fact present. I am snarky and bitter about this, but I recognize ultrasound as a craft; if the target is small, sometimes you swing and miss.
8 What I bemoan more than a simple mistake, and blame society at large more for than any victim, is the ideological value propagandized around academic degrees (and related allegations of expertise). Presented as government-stamped proof of human smartness, degrees are regularly handed out to people verifiably incapable of tying their own shoes, using words to express themselves or behaving like a members of society. People with degrees have always had to first prove to me that they aren’t assholes, but with the wide proliferation of AI psychosis a genuine rift is becoming apparent between people that are falling for this shit versus people possessing the countermeasures resulting from a less insane path to adulthood. There’s an important distinction to be made here: the people falling for it are either children (having not had, or been denied, the opportunity to collect experience in the real world) or hyperspecialized quote unquote “intellectual elites” like “business leaders” and others that had opportunity to learn, and never pursued what could inoculate them. We’re talking about people in the highest echelons of specialization in their fields, surgeons and CEOs. These are held up as the apex of human achievement, yet now I cannot see them as but helpless morons outside their field.
9 I base some of what I'm writing here on the things that made the surgeon in the podcast snap, which he describes roughly as follows: first the chatbot told him some kind of vague “everything’s connected, maaan” magical thinking theory, which on its own is as unobjectionable as it is vapid, and works on people who 1 are predisposed to that sort of thinking (nature) and 2 have never been appropriately exposed to this in either philosophy or scam-prevention workshops (nurture). In my continuing diatribe vs gen-ai chatbots, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it's also something you can crib from every cult in existence, from Aum Shinrikyo to the Czechoslovak “universe people” phenomenon, or commercialized eastern philosophy self-help book.
10 Beyond nature and (lack of) positive nurture that I've belabored, part of the susceptibility these hyperspecialists have toward the magical machine is that they were taught to think of themselves as special magical boys and girls who are a cut above everyone else and thus deserve special parking spaces. This man is dumb as shit and a specialist vascular surgeon and both of these things are true at the same time. This is cause for concern.
11 Second, the podcast continues, the chatbot told him the world’s ending and he’s the special boy, the only one who can stop it. This story is amalgamated from most major motion pictures of the past 40 years. The unoriginality is a hallmark of the LLM and the fact it worked on this guy is proof he consumed just enough media to recognize this as “kind of familiar” but not enough to know it’s complete bullshit.
12 As of writing, the world is suffering the brunt of multiple crisis. I’m not here to give relief: I’m adding another one. The ruling class top echelon manchildren and pseudointellectuals, egg-shaped or otherwise, are a known problem. The new thing coming to surface is there’s a bunch of really stupid people out there in positions that aren’t prominently presented in the media, people who might have your life in their hands, the vanishing middle class. I ask that degree-worship end as much as I ask that money-haver-worship end. Even before turning into (rightful) shaming, the mere loss of presumed untouchability, status, would engender humility in people affected. This would be beneficial to them, and consequently society at large, i.e. me.
13 I have one further, smaller addition about upbringing as a counter to slop. One could construct an argument based around ugly AI flyers being possible chiefly due to a lack of taste among the general populace. If this is true, an upbringing toward taste would lead to lesser efficacy of garish restaurant ads and thus fewer would be produced.
The opposite is possible, these things may be produced with absolutely no regard for the consumer. It may seem counterintuitive, to make a book with no regard for the reader. Such a line of thinking however presumes empathy on the part of the business idiot, a mistake known as projecting, when committed by those possessing empathy. The recent era is marked by sociopaths showing their entire ass – publicly dreaming of a world without people, companies without employees, sales without purchasers. As Donny Dump intentnionally blows up the imperial apparatus that guaranteed his rise to wealth and power irrespective of his inability, we see his actions mirrored in others of his class; tech CEOs dropping any pretense of soft power propaganda, any efforts to keep the mask on the lizard skin. It behooves us to consider that maybe, the mom and pop food truck entrepreneurs, the small business idiot sociopaths that merely aspire to true lizardhood, think of the people buying food exclusively as an unfortunate necessity in the process of making profit.
I still think it would be worth attempting giving kids free time and money so they can make art again.
14 This is not some revolutionary new invention in the art of scamming, but a logical outgrowth of how capitalism allowed on the internet behaves. A fully reciprocal, explicitly anti-commercial environment like usenet or early forums is supplanted by something like myspace with advertising to make money. Once that dries up, you stop selling advertising space but (as facebook) start selling people’s info to advertisers. (I'm taking this succint analysis from Doug Rushkoff's book Team Human.) It only makes sense that the same people that developed “dark patterns” would eventually create a scam robot that talks to you in the specifically personalized way designed to make you trust it, and if you’re gullible, (i.e. lack the countermeasures a better society would have equipped you with) this will end up with you being tricked into believing you’re a magical jedi, or should commit suicide.
15 I'm losing track of what I was writing and much like Owen from Mechagamezilla I believe an artist is remiss if they depict a social issue yet fail to solve it while depicting it, so here goes: You gotta stop being Calvinist, bro. You gotta stop thinking if someone has money or a degree that they got chosen by god in a circular fashion for being virtuous. The fact they got more cars and secure housing isn’t what you think it is. They lucked and/or sociopathed their way in and your sitch is fucked because of wealth accumulation at the .001% level caused by bribed politicians handing 0% tax rates to the wealthy + pulverizing the social security net (this applies in each country on earth). Whatever's left of you they're trying to drive into insanity or destitution with this newest weapon of theirs, usable exclusively by their class against your class, not the other way around.
16 The tech bro is the converging endpoint of worship of an ill-defined but over-propagandized smartness with worship of money. Both of these points in isolation have to be defeated but in something that’s a combination of the two with no other added preservatives, it shows a gaping hole in the value framework being pushed onto society from the top.
17 Instead of commercialized magic, put your faith in your homies, and Persons of Virtue, e.g. your humble narrator.
18 also obviously stop using chatbots for anything at all, in any capacity or scope.
