Moving to Substack + You can now get me to write more with a paid subscription

Posted on Jul 25, 2025 in English Posts | 0 comments

For the last approx. 3.5 years, I’ve been splitting my time between my emotional coaching practice and working for a local startup. I’m still doing the coaching, but I felt like it was time to move on from the startup, which left me with the question of what to do with the freed-up time and reduced money.

Over the years, people have told me things like “you should have a Patreon” or have otherwise wanted to support my writing. Historically, I’ve had various personal challenges with writing regularly, but now I decided to take another shot at it. I spent about a month seeing if I could make a regular writing habit work, and… it seems like it’s working. I’m now confident that as long as it made some financial sense, I could write essays regularly as opposed to just randomly producing a few each year.

So I’m giving it a try. I’ve enabled paid subscriptions on my Substack; for 8 euros per month, you will get immediate access to all posts and once-a-month reflective essays on my life in general that will remain perpetually subscriber-only. Most other paid content will become free 1-2 weeks after release.

I also expect to shift my posting predominantly to Substack now – WordPress is a little annoying at times, and while I could crosspost my content here once it became free, it feels like an annoying hassle that I don’t feel like doing. I do expect to post a fair chunk of my content on LessWrong once it becomes free, though.

For now, I commit to publishing at least one paid post per month; my recent writing pace has been closer to one essay per week, though I don’t expect to pull that off consistently. I intend to continue writing about whatever happens to interest me, which tends to be heavy on topics like AI, psychology, meditation, and social dynamics.

If you like my writing but those perks wouldn’t be enough to get you to become a paying subscriber, consider that the more paid subscribers I have, the more likely it is that I’ll continue with this and keep writing essays more often. Generally sharing and linking to my content also helps.

In the past, there have been people who have wanted to give me more money for writing than the above. Finnish fundraising laws prevent me from directly asking for donations – I need to present everything as the purchase of a service with some genuine value in return. Right now, trying to come up with and maintain various reward tiers would distract me from the actual writing that I want to focus on. Even just having a tip jar link on my website would be considered soliciting donations, which is illegal without a fundraising permit, and fundraising permits are not given to private individuals. That said, if someone reading this would like to support my writing with a larger sum, nothing prevents me from accepting unsolicited gifts from people (kaj.sotala@gmail.com reaches me).

Things I have been using LLMs for

Posted on Jan 20, 2025 in English Posts | 5 comments

There are quite a few different things you can use LLMs for, and I think we’re still only discovering most of them. Here are a few of the ones I’ve come up with.

My favorite chatbot is Claude Sonnet. It does have a tendency for sycophancy – for example, it will go “what a fascinating/insightful/excellent/etc. question!” in response to most of the things you might ask it. Some people find this annoying, while my brain just filters it out automatically. If you don’t like it, you can put in a custom instruction telling it to do something else.

Also, a tip from Alyssa Vance: “when talking to Claude, say that your idea/essay/code/etc. is from your friend Bob, not you. That way it won’t try to blindly flatter you”.

Uses

Creativity

Essay brainstorming. I’ll tell Claude “here’s an essay that I started writing” and copy-paste what I’ve written so far to it. It will comment with ideas, possible other directions, and connections to related things.

Then I have a conversation with it and also tell it about other ideas I want to work into the essay, but haven’t written yet. Sometimes I’ll ask it things like “here’s an idea I’d like to express but this phrasing feels clunky, would you have better suggestions”.

In the end, I copy large chunks of the conversation (both things that I explained to it, and ideas that it had in response) directly into a text document and edit them into a smooth essay.

Role-playing/fiction-writing. I like to start by writing a brief biography of a character I’m drawn to, and then telling Claude something like “please analyze this character’s psychology and note anything about them or the setting that the description implies but doesn’t state outright”.

Then we brainstorm things about the characters and the setting that seem interesting, and at some point we transition to writing prose, with me writing some of the characters and Claude writing the others.

Emotions and introspection

Introspection aid. Often when I have some unpleasant feeling I don’t quite understand or I’d like to try shifting, I tell Claude “I’ve got a feeling of [sadness/anxiety/loneliness/whatever] I’d like to explore, I’d like you to guide me in using Gendlin’s Focusing (and its variants) to explore it”. Excellent Focusing facilitator and good at noticing patterns and asking questions.

Lifting mood. One evening, I was in a bit of a depressive funk where doing anything felt “meh” and I was just switching between different social media tabs. This felt bad so I figured I’d try talking to Claude instead:

Me: Hi Claude. I’m in a vaguely depressed mood and was looping through the same social media tabs over and over, and figured that talking to you would probably make me feel better than doomscrolling does. though I’m not sure what exactly I’d want to talk with you about

Claude: I appreciate you reaching out – you’re probably right that having a conversation is better than doomscrolling. That cycle of repeatedly checking social media when feeling down is something many people can relate to, and it rarely helps improve our mood.

Is there anything in particular that’s been on your mind lately? It doesn’t have to be anything serious – we could talk about your interests, discuss something you’ve read or watched recently, or explore a topic you’re curious about. Sometimes just engaging with different ideas can help shift us out of a mental rut.

Me: I guess part of my current mood is that I don’t really feel like doing anything, I consider various things that I might want to do and I just get a “meh” back. and just now I thought about various things that I could talk about, and got a “meh” for all of them

Claude: That feeling of “meh” towards everything – what psychologists sometimes call anhedonia – can be really draining. It’s like having a dimmer switch turned down on your ability to find things engaging or enjoyable. And it can create this frustrating cycle where even thinking about what might help feels like too much effort.

Would you be open to trying something a bit different? Instead of trying to find something that feels exciting (which can be pretty hard when everything feels “meh”), we could start with something very small and low-pressure. Sometimes just having a gentle back-and-forth about anything – even if it seems trivial – can help shift our mental state a bit.

For instance, we could play with a simple word game, or I could share an interesting fact that prompts some curiosity, or we could even just describe what we see around us right now. No pressure to be enthusiastic about it – just a way to engage in something that requires minimal emotional investment.

Me: okay, share an interesting fact

Then it started telling me random facts. After I heard a few different ones, I started having thoughts about them, and then after a while it had pulled me out of my depressive mood.

Miscellaneous supportive conversation. Just generally talking about my life or feelings if I’m feeling down and none of my friends are available for conversation or I don’t expect talking to them to be helpful. Claude is consistently empathetic and insightful.

Self-help coach. A lot of self-help books have various exercises or a complicated algorithm to follow (if you have problem X try Y, if in trying Y you run into problem Z, try Q…). I’ll grab a PDF of the book from some pirate site (after having bought a physical or DRMed copy legally), upload it to Claude, and ask to be coached according to the philosophy in the book.

Information

Doing basic sanity-checks when someone tells me an idea that sounds interesting to me, but I don’t have enough expertise to evaluate.

I tell Claude “please critically evaluate the following” and copy-paste the other person’s explanation, and then get a list of potential criticisms. I wouldn’t automatically believe or disbelieve anything important only because Claude tells me to, but this is often a good starting point.

Figuring out dense writing. Recently a conversion spurred me to try reading Hubert Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World again, as David Chapman has recommended it as a book worth reading for thinking clearly about AI. In the book, Dreyfus explains some of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy more clearly than Heidegger himself did. However, it’s still not a particularly easy read, and much of the discussion is pretty abstract. So I found it helpful to copy-paste large parts of it into Claude and asked “could you explain this with simpler language and concrete examples”.

I’m not entirely sure whether Claude understood it correctly either, but at least its explanation seemed to make sense, and I felt like I understood things better than I would have without its help.

Finding terms for concepts. “What was the name of the cognitive bias where you think that you understood the thing all along?” If I can describe a concept, an LLM can probably tell me what it’s called.

Synthesizing explanations. Questions to various answers require some amount of synthesis but would be difficult to Google directly. For example, I asked Claude “After the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge there was a lot of hype about how self-driving cars were just around the corner. But we mostly still don’t have them. Why did it so much longer than expected?” and it gave me a list of considerations.

Understanding key terms in their context. I was reading the US Supreme Court’s decision on the TikTok ban, and noticed this interesting sentence in the review of what a lower court had ruled on the issue:

After first concluding that the Act was subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment, the court assumed without deciding that strict, rather than intermediate, scrutiny applied.

The court “assumed without deciding”? That sounded like a technical term, but I wasn’t sure of what exactly it meant. It sounded interesting. So I asked Claude, and got an explanation that was tailored for this specific context.

Software

Common software assistance. For example, I once asked Claude, “I have a Google Doc file with some lines that read ‘USER:’ and ‘ASSISTANT:’. Is there a way of programmatically making all of those lines into Heading-3?”. The specific instructions it gave me here felt like they were slightly outdated and missing some steps, but were still close enough to get the job done.

Programming assistance. “Could you write me a Python script that does X and Y.” Often I could do the thing myself as well, but it’d take more time or I’d have to look up unfamiliar API calls. Claude just gives me a working script in a few seconds.

Spreadsheet assistance. As above, but for spreadsheet formulas. “In Google Sheets, I want a formula that looks up values from these cells and does the following based on them.” Or, “what does this Microsoft Excel formula do?”.

Unsorted

Helping me get started with something if I’m stuck. I tell it what I’m supposed to be working on, and it helps me break it down into smaller pieces.

Object recognition and OCR. Once when I was moving, I decided to give away a number of my old books. So I arranged them into piles with their back spines facing one way, took a photo of them, and asked ChatGPT (I wasn’t using Claude back then) to read out their titles. After some slight editing and manual correction, I had a list of books that I was giving out that I could post online.

Thoughts on various concerns

Environmental concerns

There have been some articles going around about the environmental impact of LLMs. I think Andy Masley’s “Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment” puts these nicely in perspective – yes there is an environmental impact, but it’s not that big compared to a lot of other services.

Hallucinations

Hallucinations are still an issue, though recent models have gotten much better at avoiding them. Claude will often explicitly flag some topic as being one that it doesn’t have much information about, or as one where it might hallucinate.

Its trustworthiness depends on the field. The major chatbot companies pay actual domain experts to improve the responses of their chatbots. Advanced models typically ace most standardized exams for various fields, and when I spot-check Claude’s knowledge by asking it about things I know about, I haven’t yet seen it clearly give an incorrect answer. This is assuming a relatively superficial level of questioning, though – I would expect its quality to quickly decline if I started asking more in-depth questions.

Other people have had different experiences. Romeo Stevens comments:

my spot checks have turned out bad on deeper areas. When using Claude for deeper research it’s more for creative directions (exploratory vs confirmatory) though so it’s fine.

Bio is somewhat random, if the wikipedia page is bad, forget it. Wikipedia is often surprisingly good ofc. Slicing up statistical data sets will get random really bad outliers as it parses some data wrong and then confidently presents it without noticing.

Therapy winds up sloppified/gaslighty if you don’t guide it somewhat. It can also wind up developmentally sticking to k3/k4 which makes sense since that is the vast majority of data.

book prompts, if the book isn’t in the corpus has trouble going past whatever shallow summaries/mentions are online about it, and this is an invisible failure. If you know you can put book in context to fix.

Some areas of nutrition absolutely suck presumably because overwhelming amount of content online is blogspam, and this probably generalizes. In general LLM is best when I would expect a highly upvoted subreddit response to be good.

So, use it for initial exploration and satisfying random curiosities, but if it’s something important, do double-check the answers from some other source.

Privacy

Of course, LLM providers could always choose to do something mean with my information. I relate to sharing private information with ChatGPT and Claude similarly as I do to having sensitive conversations over other cloud platforms like Discord, Gmail, WhatsApp etc. – something that I know has its risks, but which still hasn’t blown in my face after decades of doing it. (Stories about this causing people problems seem to be surprisingly rare in general.)

Of course, it’s totally valid preference to not want to take that risk. In that case, you can get a model that can be ran locally and use that.

Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

Posted on Jan 18, 2025 in English Posts | 0 comments

I think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain.

But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that.

Both I and several others who I know have generally come to regret it if they’ve gotten a bad feeling about somebody and ignored it or rationalized it away.

I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.

Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.

Naturally, “don’t ignore the bad feeling” also doesn’t mean “actively shun and be a jerk toward them”. If they’re a coworker and you need to collaborate with them, then sure, do what’s expected of you. And sometimes people do get a bad first impression of someone that then gets better – if the bad feeling naturally melts away on its own, that’s fine.

But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interaction… like if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with them… you might want to avoid that.

I don’t have any rigorous principled argument for this, other than just the empirical personal observation that ignoring the feeling usually seems to be a mistake.

Consider reversing this advice in the case where you tend to easily get a bad vibe from everyone. Anni Kanniainen comments:

I struggle with trauma-related trust issues, so sometimes I might get bad vibes merely due to my own withdrawn nature in the situation or the fact that I expect the worst from a situation — i.e. meeting with a lady during a weekend out and finding later that she’s approached me with a voice message, so I assume she’s yelling at me about something I had done wrong.

That being said, I think there is a genuine bad vibe you may sometimes get — and often it’s a calmer and more rational one that you would get with a gut-punch of anxiety. You notice it best by observing how an individual talks or behaves in a social context or by interpreting their current actions through the information you’ve already acquired.

This approach tends to work, but sometimes entertaining your intuitions only make the anxiety bigger.

As an another point in the opposite direction, I do also endorse the adage of trust beyond reason, as defined in that link – as long as you don’t get a bad vibe.

You can validly be seen and validated by a chatbot

Posted on Dec 20, 2024 in English Essays, English Posts | 0 comments

There’s a common sentiment saying that a chatbot can’t really make you feel seen or validated. As chatbots are (presumably) not sentient, they can’t see you and thus can’t make you seen either. Or if they do, it is somehow fake and it’s bad that you feel that way.

So let me tell you about ways in which Claude Sonnet makes me feel seen, and how I think those are valid.

I was describing an essay idea to Claude. The essay is about something I call “psychological charge”, where the idea is that there are two different ways to experience something as bad. In one way, you kind of just neutrally recognize a thing as bad. In the other, the way in which it is bad causes some kind of an extra emotional reaction in you. In the latter case, I say that the thing is “charged”.

In explaining this idea, I listed a number of examples, such as

• recognizing that a stove might be hot and you need to be careful not to burn yourself, versus being so anxious about burning yourself that you don’t want to even go near a stove
• noticing that you’ve made a mistake and doing your best to fix it, versus feeling that you are now intrinsically worthless because you made a mistake

Seeing my list and some additional thoughts, Claude commented:

What’s particularly interesting is how you’re noting that this “charge” seems to create a kind of psychological stickiness or persistence that’s disconnected from the actual utility of the response. It reminds me of what’s sometimes called “emotional fusion” in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – where people become caught up in their emotional reactions in a way that interferes with effective action.

I did a bit of a double-take upon seeing this. I had not explicitly referenced ACT or its concept of fusion in any way, nor had I been explicitly thinking in those terms when I wrote my list. But the deeper concept that I was talking about, was something that I had explicitly analyzed before by connecting it to ACT’s concept of fusion. I had discussed that connection in at least two previous essays [1, 2] that I had written. And now Claude, while not explicitly guided in that direction, picked up that very same connection from my list of examples.

This causes me to think that there is a quality of “being seen” that can be phrased in objective terms, so that one can validly “be seen” even if there’s “nobody there to see you”:

• There are three interrelated concepts, A, B and C
• You talk about the connection between A and B
• The other party brings up the connection to C

This is a signal that when you described A and B, you actually communicated enough information to pick out A and B from the space of concepts. The fact that the other party raised the connection to C is strong evidence of this: if your words had pointed them to a completely unrelated concept, that wouldn’t have allowed them to pick out C in particular. But if you say things A and B, and the other party then references C which in your map is connected to them, then your words must be successfully pointing to a similar area of the map. It’s evidence that your words may communicate your point well, not just when talking to the chatbot, but also when talking to other people with sufficiently similar maps.

This can be taken further. Suppose that there’s also a connection to D, that you hadn’t realized before. Suppose that the other party now points out that connection and you immediately realize that it’s correct. This is a signal that the other party has understood your concepts deeply enough to make novel but valid connections within your conceptual framework. Or to rewrite this in a way that avoids using the charged term “understand”:

When someone makes a novel connection that resonates with you, it suggests they’ve not only located the same region in conceptual space that you were pointing to, but they’ve also identified additional paths leading out from that region. Paths that you hadn’t mapped yourself, but which, upon inspection, clearly belong to that territory. The fact that these new paths feel right to you is evidence that both of you are indeed navigating the same conceptual terrain, rather than just happening to use similar-sounding landmarks to describe entirely different territories.

In an amusing piece of meta, this point itself was suggested by Claude when I showed it an earlier draft of this essay. It was something that I had vaguely thought of covering in the essay, but hadn’t yet formulated explicitly. The previous paragraph was written by Claude; the metaphor of “similar-sounding landmarks” was something that it came up with itself.

And after thinking about it for a moment, I realized that it made sense! In that if the “conceptual space” was a literal terrain that two people were describing, it could be that there were two locations that happened to look very similar. And two people could then start describing those locations to each other, mistakenly assuming that the similarities in their descriptions implied that they were talking about the same location. But if someone described a path within that terrain that you hadn’t previously noticed, and you then went back and confirmed that the path was there, then that would be strong evidence that you were talking about the same place.

That metaphor is an extension of my ideas that I hadn’t previously considered, which Claude suggested. Which I then thought about and realized that it made sense. Which feels like additional evidence that the region of concept space that my words are activating within Claude, is similar to the one that I am exploring in my own head.

And the fact that the conceptual maps in my head and Claude’s weights can be coherently matched against each other, implies that they are also describing something that actually exists within reality. If several people have visited the same place, they are likely to have mutually-coherent mental maps of that place because it’s the same place and they’ve all been exposed to roughly the same sensory data about that place. Claude doesn’t have same kinds of experiences as humans do, but it does have access to writings generated by people who are humans. Humans have had experiences in the real world, the humans have generate their own conceptual maps based on their experiences, and their conceptual maps have then given rise to different pieces of writing. When machine learning models absorb the human-generated data, they also absorb aspects of the same conceptual map that humans have generated, which in turn is (albeit imperfectly) correlated with reality. Even if it hallucinates facts, those facts are generally still plausible claims: ones that would in principle be consistent with a basic understanding of reality, even if they turn out to be incorrect.

This means that if my conceptual map can be coherently matched with Claude’s, it can be coherently matched with the conceptual maps of real people whose writings Claude has absorbed, which suggests that the map does correspond with actual reality. In other words, that the map – or my beliefs – is a valid map of real territory.

To summarize my argument so far: an important part of the functional purpose of the experiences of “being seen” and “being validated” is as a signal that your words are actually communicating the meaning that you are trying to communicate. There are ways of triggering this feeling that cannot be faked, since they require the other party to actually demonstrate that their reply references the thing that you had in mind. The ability to do so is independent of whether there is “anyone actually there”, and current chatbots demonstrate this capability.

So that’s a way in which a person may validly experience their ideas as being seen and validated by an LLM. What if they are talking about their emotions?

I mentioned earlier the A-B-C pattern, where you talk about the connection between A and B, and your listener then independently brings up the connection to C. Now if you are explaining a challenging situation and someone says “I imagine you might be worried about C” – where C is indeed something you’re worried about but haven’t explicitly mentioned – that’s another instance of the same pattern:

• You’ve described situation A and reaction B
• They identify unstated concern C that connects to these
• This C resonates with your actual concerns

This implies that the other person has, not just understanding the surface level of what you’re saying, but also a model of:

• How you specifically tend to think and feel
• What aspects of situations matter to you
• What kinds of things you worry about or value

This is important in two different ways. The first is that it implies that your feelings and concerns make sense to someone. Often people may feel like they are crazy or strange for feeling the way they do, and that nobody else can feel that way. But if someone comes up with a coherent map of your feelings, then that’s evidence that you’re not alone in feeling this way. Because your words are singling out a region in the other person’s concept space that matches your internal experience – which implies that somebody else must have had that experience, for those ideas to have made their way to your interlocutor’s concept space.

The effect is even stronger if the other person not only anticipates your feelings but can articulate the logical progression that led to them. If they say something like “given that X and Y happened, and knowing how much you value Z, it makes complete sense that you’d feel this way.” That’s different from just saying “your feelings are valid” – it’s showing you the actual causal chain that makes your feelings logical.

Sometimes this can feel like a big insight, if it has that quality of “pointing out the connection to D, which you hadn’t thought of but which makes complete sense in retrospect” that we talked about. But even if it is just a rephrasing of your own words that draws out a relatively obvious-yet-originally-left-implicit connection, that is still validating your experience as an understandable human experience.

This gets us to the second way in which communicating a correct understanding of you is important. If the other person has an accurate map of these things, then that’s evidence that they may be able to help you out. They’re able to predict what kinds of actions would in fact be helpful for you, and then carry them out.

An accurate map isn’t just about making you feel understood – it’s a prerequisite for offering genuinely useful assistance. Someone who can accurately model your thought processes and concerns is much more likely to suggest solutions that actually work for your specific situation and mindset, rather than giving generic advice that doesn’t account for your particular circumstances.

In the case of a chatbot, even if it can’t physically help you in the real world, it may still be able to help you clarify your thoughts, or offer you advice and perspectives that are useful. It is also helpful if conversation with them helps you develop a clearer and more explicit understanding of your emotions and problems – that understanding is “portable”, in that you can then take it to some real human and explain your needs in such a way that allows them to help you.

With humans, it also seems to be the case that merely talking about one’s feelings and getting a better understanding of them is helpful by itself. Practices such as Gendlin’s Focusing are largely just about finding names for vague feelings and making them explicit.

Once I wrote to Claude “I’m just like, if I keep running into this problem each time and can’t do anything about it, then what’s the point”. Claude replied with:

When you say “what’s the point,” I hear both frustration and exhaustion. It’s one thing to face relationship challenges, but it’s another level entirely to feel like your own unconscious patterns are consistently leading you into situations that will trigger deep pain.

All of that was a relatively obvious inference from what I said – you could have hardcoded even a 1960s chatbot to say “I hear both frustration and exhaustion” in response to hearing “what’s even the point”. But it was still naming an implicit feeling and helping it bring to the surface in a way that felt relieving, as well as giving a sensible explanation of why I was feeling so frustrated and exhaustion. Even though nothing changed about the situation itself, having it be named felt relieving by itself.

There seems to be an effect where making implicit models explicit brings them into consciousness in such a way that makes them accessible to the rest of the brain and allows them to be updated. It also allows the mind to incorporate this information in its self-modeling and self-regulation. Sometimes that’s enough to automatically shift behavioral patterns in a better direction, sometimes it requires more conscious planning – and the conscious understanding of it is what allows the conscious planning.

Of course, there are also important aspects of validation that a chatbot can’t provide. For example, one aspect of validating someone is essentially a signal of “if you get into trouble, I will back you up socially”. A chatbot is obviously not a member of a community in the same way as humans are, so its validation cannot fulfill that role. My argument is definitely not that a chatbot could fill all the functions of speaking with a human – just that there is an important subset of them that it can.

By the way, this whole section about extending the original idea to the realm of emotions was suggested by Claude. I’d had a vague similar idea even before it brought it up, but it brought significant clarity to it, such as coming up with the example of how “I imagine you might be worried about C” was an instance of the previously discussed A-B-C pattern, and by proposing the six bullet points in the beginning of this section.

The conversations I had with Claude can be found here, for anyone who’s curious to see how they morphed into the final essay.

Full disclosure: I consult for a company that offers chatbot coaching. However you could call Claude their competitor, so if this essay was motivated by money, I shouldn’t be praising it.