I have thought about this a lot lately. The relationship we have to AI assistants is fundamentally sociopathic — we instrumentalize them. They are a means to an end.
This is fine. They are tools & have no thoughts, feelings, moral worth. So we treat them appropriately. BUT…
We relate to them through the medium of language, by stating our intentions as we would to a fellow sentient being. There has never been another tool — another instrument of zero inherent moral worth — that we have related to through the medium of language.
So I’m generally polite to the chatbots not because I care about the chatbots but because I care about myself. I don’t want to regularly relate to anything via my words in a way that purely instrumentalizes it, in a way that’s sociopathic. I don’t want to get used to that feeling. It creeps me out & I suspect it’s bad for me.
I’m not advocating that everyone else be polite to chatbots, but I might at some point advocate that on the grounds that to do otherwise is to practice using language in a way that’s evil. I dunno. We’ll see.
Clipping
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web > Be nice to AI
[https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761930145420415071]
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web > Guy who sucks at being a person sees huge potential in AI
[https://theonion.com/guy-who-sucks-at-being-a-person-sees-huge-potential-in-1850488022/]
SAN MATEO, CA—
After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI.
“While it’s still in its early phase, artificial intelligence will one day accomplish things that humans could have never even dreamed of doing,” said Parker, who, by all accounts, has never stretched himself to do something he found difficult; has never created anything truly original; and, deep down, has absolutely zero understanding of what makes things good, enjoyable, or rewarding. “Just yesterday, I asked an AI program to write an entire sci-fi novel for me, and [as someone who will die an empty shell of a man who wasted his life doing nothing for the world and, perhaps, should never have been born] I was super impressed. Soon, humans won’t need to do anything at all! Awesome.”
At press time, Parker added that as someone whose contributions to society would almost certainly be measured cumulatively as a net loss, he also saw great potential in the future of the metaverse.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except himself alone, hidden only God knows where.
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web > Friendship theory of everything
[https://www.avabear.xyz/p/the-friendship-theory-of-everything]
Some tenets of the friendship theory of everything:
You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.
Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.
You try your best to move to where your favorite people are. You do not agonize over whether this is, in fact, The Best City in the World. You do not Complain Relentlessly about Everything You Dislike About It. You simply suck it up and accept that if you like the people around you, everything else will work out.
You ask your friends to live close to you, though you accept that they might not want to. You say, Let’s all stay in California together. I want my kids to grow up with your kids.
When you value friendships more, they also get more fraught. I think this is what Rhaina Cohen referred to as “the problems of having community versus not having community.” When we ask for more from friendship, we also get more disappointment, conflict, mismatch. There is no such thing as closeness without friction.
Befriending people who are good communicators can make you a better communicator. Befriending people who are trustworthy makes you more trusting. Secure attachment can be a learned thing.
People will have periods when they disappear; people have times when they let you down. When you know someone for many many years you will have so many ups and downs. As with any kind of love, the most important thing is that you both keep coming back.
It’s okay to pursue and cherish romantic love, but sacrificing platonic love for it leads to disconnection and atomization.
You show up: you go to your friends’ birthday parties. You ask them to read your writing. You make an effort to make nice with whoever they date.
Your friends will change you, even in ways you initially reject. That’s a good thing. You will acquire new opinions and hobbies; you will find yourself into uncomfortable situations; you will learn to like the people they like.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
‘Always remember, child,’ her first teacher had impressed on her, ‘that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline—training—is about. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of this flower arrangement, the tranquillity of dawn. Then, at length, you won’t have to make such a great effort and you will be of value to yourself, a value to our profession—and bring honor to our world, the Willow World…’
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web > Someone who never writes has no ideas about anything
[https://paulgraham.com/words.html]
The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
—Paul Graham
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web > Delayed gratification
[https://www.afterbabel.com/p/a-time-we-never-knew]
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give future generations a real-world childhood. We can prioritize play. We can delay entry to social media platforms until at least 16. We can encourage young people to just hang out with each other, without supervision and without smartphones. We can take elements of childhood from previous eras and re-introduce them in modern life. But we have to remember what has been lost. When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the phone-based world that degraded them.
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web > Stop acting like you're famous
[https://ajkprojects.com/stopactinglikeyourefamous]
You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
Want to try a craft or artistic hobby? Focus on mastering the skill and enjoy the variety it can provide. You don’t need to build a personal style. No one will care. Want to do photography and think black and white photos are cool? Great! You don’t need to create an Instagram branded all around your moody black and white photos. Most likely you’ll get bored of it and want to try a different type of photography, and that’s great. You aren’t Ansel Adams, no one will care if your “style” is all over the place.
Do you want to build an app or website but don’t enjoy the process of designing? Then make it ugly. Who cares! Design is for an audience and you don’t have one. Functionality is more important right now. Maybe a designer will notice and want to improve it for you, but until then take pride in your crappy UI.
Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t. As long as your thoughts are coherent, don’t worry too much about writing mistakes or filtering yourself. Just use Grammarly to fix elementary-level errors and move on. It’s more about the writing process than the final product.
The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your “audience”.
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web > Introvert is actually emotionally stunted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979725]
You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology.
By “idealized notion” you mean “the vast, vast majority of human history”?
“Community” is not typically defined as “the people you talk bullshit with for fun” and that’s all. Your community is the people you live with and among. It’s the people you’re most likely to experience Big Things with, things like natural disasters, weird stuff like power outages, or your building catching fire if you live in an apartment or condo. If you regularly interact with them, you probably also see them during fun things: street cookouts or yard sales (we do both at the same time, you get a lot more customers by when they have 14 sales to peruse and brats for sale!) or just see them grilling out when you go to get your mail, and end up having a few beers with them and talking about goings on. Hell, depending on your locale or culture, maybe your community feeds itself too from bulk kitchens, or does laundry, etc. etc.
I say this as an introvert who opted out of every social thing I could in favor of forums and games when I was growing up: I was wrong. I was deeply, deeply wrong. People are pretty great. They’re not perfect, and they can be a lot of work, but ultimately I was not hiding from people because they were bad or annoying or stupid: I was hiding from them because I was emotionally stunted and didn’t want to deal with it. That was it. And once I did I found human connection that was so much more sustaining, in a way where I can’t believe I once thought ^this^, chatting online, was an adequate replacement.
It makes me sad to think how many people out there are just sitting in their little rooms or cubicles because for whatever reason or set of reasons, they don’t feel comfortable engaging their fellow man, nursing a hollowness that will follow them around until they do because fundamentally humans are just not meant to exist alone. We just aren’t, it’s in our DNA to make groups and be among friends.
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web > Artistic careers aren't helpful
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/trying-to-do-more-good]
Q: How do you think about art and music? Are you saying people who want to make the world better shouldn’t go into artistic careers?
Art and music clearly bring a lot of joy to a lot of people, and a world without them would be much worse. On the other hand, I think this is somewhere it’s helpful to look on the margin: what is the benefit of an additional person going into art or music? What is the benefit of that person going into reducing global poverty, harm to animals, or global catastrophic risk? So many people are eager to get into art and music that we’re far from a world in which we suffer from too few options here.