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I'm curious how the Motte sees using AI for therapy / life advice? Online I'm seeing a ton of people recommend Claude especially, but others are skeptical.
On the one hand I could see it being useful because of the fact that you have nigh-unfettered access to it, and can really dig into deep problems. Also, it's trained on all the therapy texts of course.
The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.
Overall I think it's a fascinating area of development, and I'm still optimistic that LLMs could help people much more than the average therapist. Mainly because I'm pretty bearish on the help people get from the average therapist.
Anyway, what do people think about therapy becoming AI?
My girlfriend pitched the latter to me after she finished it. I decided it sounded incredibly stressful.
Can’t remember where I first heard it. It wasn’t Watchmen. Probably either English class or one of those Egypt-adjacent kid’s books.
Yes, people from themotte, well just two of us really.
Weirdly enough, in the parody series Barry Trotter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerber_(parodist)), Barry and Ermine get married and have a son who's a Squib. Because their son has grown up around magical people, he experiences a "grass-is-greener" effect in which Muggle culture seems impossibly exciting and exotic to him. His childhood ambition is to become an actuary in an insurance firm.
She’s the daughter of dentists and speaks in RP English, it would be the correct assumption.
Medications and management of medical issues is more complicated than most realize. Medical education emphasizes teaching doctors about our knowledge deficiencies for a reason, and it's very common for people in the field to grossly overestimate their understanding and knowledge. We complain about nurses, midlevels, and even other doctors having no fucking clue what they are doing at times.
It is extremely challenging for a layman, even one who is intelligent and informed, to bridge the training gap.
"Ok but who cares" is a reasonable question, but it is important to understand that errors don't just hurt you. A big example right now is antibiotics. Left to their own devices people will ask for and use antibiotics even when it's dangerous or simply not even a bacterial infection. This has a downstream effect on others, like an increase in antibiotic resistance.
It's also easy to hurt yourself and we find it unacceptable to allow society to not pick up the bill.
Let's say you have some mild chronic pain like arthritis, you read and are smart enough to know that ibuprofen can be good for this. But then you don't know the right dose, or the right frequency and then don't realize it is not a good idea with your diabetes. After a reasonable amount of time your kidneys are dead and you end up on dialysis - and society is paying for that. Even if you have good insurance or a lot of wealth that's a spot that could be given to someone else.
And that's a medication you can already buy over the counter.
Every pure blood family is a well known family because the total number of wizards in Britain is in the thousands, almost certainly below 20,000 even with much longer lifespan than normal for humans. There are conceivably older wizards in their nineties or hundreds who know by name the vast majority of the wizard population in the country.
It’s also a largely post-scarcity society in which bad jobs are done by magic or slaves (eg. the dishes do themselves in the Weasley kitchen), so we imagine people working “service jobs” like shopkeepers or cooks do so primarily because they derive enjoyment from that customer interaction rather than because they need the money. There is financial inequality but it’s mostly abstract except when it comes to the purchase of some magical goods and services (like wands or brooms or magic candy) that cannot be conjured out of thin air and thus require the labor of actual other wizards. Textbooks and other things seem to have some semi-inviolable magic copyright attached.
Most people are essentially middle class, working in the few things not outsourced to magic (aforementioned artisanal magic crafts, the justice/courts system and government, some hospitality, and education). Many people appear to do just fine having little or no real employment, perhaps because wizards can conjure space, light, heat, food, warmth and can teleport. In this context, a job in “the civil service” ie Ministry of Magic isn’t the same as a sinecure in a muggle government. It’s likely the ministry creates a job for any wizard who wants one; the destitute are those wizards who choose to be.
Thanks for adding context. It would probably be better without the somewhat blatant culture war bits.
I'm a little ambivalent as to the extent to which this arguably constitutes "recruiting for a cause," but I will, tentatively, allow it.
if god forbid we go under some invisible sum of $spending per minute, then they actually slam the bill on the table and just kick me out as if I am some hobo. So much for friendliness.
The hell? I have literally never had this happen in my entire life in the US. Either there's some other layer to why you're having that experience, or you are the unluckiest person to ever visit a restaurant here.
I would agree Parisians are crazy behind the wheel of a car, but I think that's orthogonal to friendliness.
Yes, U.S. waiters are awful.
"Hi, I'm Stacy, and I'm going to be taking care of you today".
10 minutes after your food arrives: "You still working on that?"
French service is much better, generally.
The cultures are in some ways more compatible with the US, but there's also an element of those countries being poor and needing tourist $$$ more, so their tourist-facing norms ended up being shaped differently.
We finally made it to Aquilo.
Are you playing in a group?
No. There are either aliens (or whatever) or there's a very deliberate and massive psyop to that effect underway, involving high ranking members of both parties, lying officers, fake footage, etc etc etc.
We're past the point of "nothing to see here." That's now just the uncomfortable noise people make when they figure there are no aliens but can't think of a reason for the psyop they feel like really getting behind.
Week 12 thread now live: https://www.themotte.org/post/1258/weekly-nfl-thread-week-12
I believe the answer to this is basically anywhere other than Tokyo, Kyoto and Okinawa.
If you can deal with cold, I had friends recently visit Hokkaido (Sapporo for sure, think other places as well) and they reported it was comparatively bereft of tourists.
For warmer climes, I've generally heard that Kyushu isn't as flooded with foreign tourists as Honshu while still having plenty of impressive natural and historical sites.
I recall reading it in a high school English class. I wouldn't say it became more memorable, but it was reinforced by 2 TV shows many years apart: 1st with Lost when an episode featured a vast stone foot that appeared to be the remains of a larger statue, which seemed like a clear reference to the poem; 2nd with Breaking Bad when an episode was titled Ozymandias in an explicit reference to the poem and likely meant to point out Walt's growing pride and hubris and hint at his inevitable downfall.
There are certain word choices that differ between classes. Using the words “toilet” or “posh” is a very clear indicator that you aren’t upper or upper middle class.
Washing your hands before eating and being generally obsessive over hygiene standards is middle class, while the upper class generally prefer shabby chic and pick up half-finished meat bones with their hands.
Steretypically, the middle classes are afflicted with status anxiety, and therefore obsess over getting things right. Witness the Dursleys scripting out dinner etiquette before Mr. Dursley’s boss arrives for dinner. Whereas etiquette for the upper classes is just ‘whatever the upper classes do’ so they don’t fuss about it too much.
A classic example is the very PMC Nick Clegg and his wife going to dinner with the the Camerons (the Prime Minister and his wife, as upper class as they get) and being shocked when Mrs. Cameron used cheap mayonnaise from a bottle instead of using something fancy or making it herself. Not needing status symbols is the status symbol.
If I add in context are you going to make it visible ?
First encountered it in class in either grade or middle school, cemented by Civ IV in high school.
Finished Final Cut last night, loved it. Started My Brilliant Friend on the train this morning, having heard from everyone and their mother that it's fantastic. Only got about fifteen pages into it, don't know where it's going yet.
Save the comment and return to it is the closest we have.
I understand. One aspect of my problem is how do I collect information of different formats from different places into information that actually allows me to improve my life and the life of others.
I'd suggest the old fashioned way, just writing down your summary and sharing that summary. If a bunch of people are doing bad workouts, share a better workout routine among them. Cite it with sources from the people that know workouts.
A suggestion for mixing up your information diet:
Real life is not siloed in the same way as the Internet, so you can mix up your information diet by sampling from your locality. It is of course still siloed in its own ways. I live in a neighborhood with a bunch of families, all of my friends here are parents. But I know there is a variety of political views, news sources, and job experience among them. The online silos of my neighbors look very different from one another.
Are you in the American cultural umbrella? Martin Luther did a number on the concept, but it definitely still comes up, mostly as a strategy for recruiting nonbelievers.
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