Things I have been using LLMs for
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...
Read MoreDon’t ignore bad vibes you get from people
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...
Read MoreYou can validly be seen and validated by a chatbot
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...
Read MoreTrying to translate when people talk past each other
Sometimes two people are talking past each other, and I try to help them understand each other (with varying degrees of success). It’s as if they are looking at the same object, but from different angles. Mostly they see the same thing – most of the words have shared meanings. But some key words and assumptions have a different meaning to them. Often, I find that one person (call them...
Read MoreCircling as practice for “just be yourself”
I mentioned on Twitter that to a significant extent, Circling taught me what “just be yourself” means to such an extent that I have a consistently good time on dates because I don’t feel like I need to perform. Somebody asked me to elaborate, so here’s what I wrote in response: — For those who don’t know, Circling is… a practice that’s infamously...
Read MoreMy 10-year retrospective on trying SSRIs
In 2014 I got on SSRIs the first time, and they were amazing. I wrote online about how I suddenly had energy to do things, could concentrate on stuff, and generally just felt better and happier. I now got a message from someone who’d found my writings and was wondering what my experience with antidepressants was now, 10 years later. I wrote this reply to them, and thought I might as well...
Read MoreGames of My Childhood: The Troops
The Troops (Finnish “joukot”, could also be translated as “the armies” or “the forces”) was a game of pretend that I played the most with my friend Eero; I believe Aleksi also joined in. The central premise was that each time that you played a video game and killed, recruited, rescued, built, or otherwise destroyed/obtained an enemy, character, or unit in that...
Read MoreIndecision and internalized authority figures
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure (the writer is a Jungian therapist so attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I think it can be broader) but is unable to predict what action they would approve of. I feel like that has some intuitive truth...
Read MoreLinks and brief musings for June
Links in English Schrödinger’s Ursula Apparently the concept of Schrödinger’s cat got popularized thanks to Ursula Le Guin. Schrödinger originally invented the cat image as a gag. If true believers in quantum mechanics are right that the microworld’s uncertainties are dispelled only when we observe it, Schrödinger felt, this must also sometimes happen in the macroworld –...
Read MoreLinks for May
In English What would happen if a superintelligent AI was aligned with your values? The details here are a little too much in the “superintelligence is magic that can achieve anything” direction to my taste (I don’t think that anything will just be instantly teleported into safety, superintelligent AI or not), but I don’t doubt that the same results could be achieved via...
Read MoreWhy I no longer identify as transhumanist
Someone asked me how come I used to have a strong identity as a singularitarian / transhumanist but don’t have it anymore. Here’s what I answered them: ——- So I think the short version is something like: transhumanism/singularitarianism used to give me hope about things I felt strongly about. Molecular nanotechnology would bring material abundance, radical life extension...
Read MoreMy idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion
Here’s a conception that I have about sacredness, divinity, and religion. There’s a sense in which love and friendship didn’t have to exist. If you look at the animal kingdom, you see all kinds of solitary species, animals that only come together for mating. Members of social species – such as humans – have companionship and cooperation, but many species do quite...
Read MoreThe 99% principle for personal problems
Often when people are dealing with an issue – emotional, mental, or physical – there’s genuine progress and the issue becomes less and seems to go away. Until it comes back, seemingly as bad as before. Maybe the person developed a coping mechanism that worked, but only under specific circumstances. Maybe the person managed to eliminate one of the triggers for the thing, but it...
Read MoreCreating a family with GPT-4
ME: Create a merchant character suitable for a medieval fantasy setting. Start by coming up with their age, gender, and one defining personality trait. Then add two other personality traits. Then describe some internal conflict created by the interaction of these traits. Describe the history of the character and how their personality caused them to end up where they are now. GPT-4: Age:...
Read More[Fiction] The boy in the glass dome
A boy is sitting inside a glass dome. It would just barely have enough space for him to stand. It’s night, and he’s watching the stars. He has been doing that for a long time. There’s a small tube attached to the bottom of the dome. A miniature cargo train runs through that tube, bringing with it small bubbles of nutrients and oxygen. When the train reaches the dome, the bubbles...
Read MoreIn Defense of Chatbot Romance
(Full disclosure: I work for a company that develops coaching chatbots, though not of the kind I’d expect anyone to fall in love with – ours are more aimed at professional use, with the intent that you discuss work-related issues with them for about half an hour per week.) Recently there have been various anecdotes of people falling in love or otherwise developing an intimate relationship...
Read MoreFake qualities of mind
There’s a thing where you’d like to have one “quality of mind”, but it’s not available, but you substitute it with a kind of a fake or alternative version of the same. Which is fine as long as you realize you’re doing it, but becomes an issue if you forget that what’s happening. For example, you have a job that you’re sometimes naturally motivated...
Read MoreMy current take on Internal Family Systems “parts”
I was recently asked how literal/metaphorical I consider the Internal Family Systems model of your mind being divided into “parts” that are kinda like subpersonalities. The long answer would be my whole sequence on the topic, but that’s pretty long and also my exact conception of parts keeps shifting and getting more refined through the sequence. So one would be excused for...
Read MoreThe horror of what must, yet cannot, be true
There’s a type of experience that I feel should have its own word, because nothing that I can think of seems like a fair description. A first pass would be something like agony, utter horror, a feeling that you can’t stand this, that you are about to fall apart. But those aren’t actually the thing, I think. They are reactions to the thing. The thing is more like a sense of utter...
Read More[Invisible Networks] Goblin Marketplace
"The Goblin Marketplace is that way. Assuming that you have ears on your head, you can't miss it." The expression is not metaphorical: even if you were deaf, you _would_ hear the sounds of the Marketplace. That is, assuming that nobody had cut your ears off.
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This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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