@datarama that's sad, that the little boy who was so excited about the (genuine!) potentials of technology was so let down by the capitalist realities of what it was turned to.

I've suffered a similar disillusionment, and am lucky enough to have been able to take a career break and retrain in an entirely different field. But I know that's a privilege of circumstances few share.

Does your past self have any words for you in response?

@datarama oof, I feel you. I have a tendency towards that style of thinking myself, and even tho it never got bad enough to seek help or a diagnosis, the intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be exhausting at times.

I wish there was some oversight of the harms that internet algorithms can do to people. I'm sorry you were a victim of that. 🫂️

I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.

The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.

So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.

Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.

It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.

We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.

What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?

Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.

And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.

I can be so fucking stupid, it turns out.

Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?

I think about that a lot.

LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.

When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.

I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.

It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.

It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.

When a human being, of any gender, is allowed to operate without accountability, they go nucking futs. (Technical term.) Look at Musk. Look at Trump. Look at the manosphere.

They've got to be told "no". And they've got to learn to understand it. 4/

I remember when this was first pointed out to me years ago, and then suddenly I started seeing it everywhere. Even progressive female friends were perpetuating it. I was flabbergasted.

"Boys will be boys" is insidious, and "testosterone causes violence" is the scientific-sounding gloss of it. 3/

What you've got to understand about this is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We tell boys "oh you can't help being violent, it's just in your nature", and then they go out and do violence, and we say "well this just proves it".

It's a core part of what we call the "boys will be boys" phenomenon, where we forgive any manner of misbehaviour from boys and men, and shift the responsibility onto women and girls. We blame what a girl was wearing, or the fact that women keep refusing to go out with some dude. Or we blame mothers. It never seems to land on the guys themselves. 2/

"But if testosterone doesn't cause violence then why are cis guys so violent?"
Grimaces

Ok look. I'm sure I once believed this, so I'll treat the question in good faith. It's a common pseudoscientific dogma, one spread by high school science teachers and shitty "feminist" YouTubers alike. But it's bollocks. 1/

Trans women tend to be complete anathema to people like this because we represent liberation in femininity, which their internalised patriarchy long ruled out as a possibility. The way to power is being less feminine, they say. What are you doing? This must be a trick!

She (the boss) liked me, tho. She did recognise that I was intelligent and hard-working and a really fucking valuable employee, to be fair. I brought out this weird mothering instinct in her. She encouraged me to be more assertive, more forceful. More masculine.

I think she'd have a fucking fit if she saw me now.

My first boss was a holdover from this, she had this booming voice and was into classic cars and would have all the other women in the office make coffee for her and the guys.

My coworker was this willowy, blonde, soft-spoken young woman, and the boss displayed a visible disdain for her and her femininity. I guess she was everything the boss had strived to unbecome.

And what that really brings up for me as someone who grew up in the eighties is the supposed "feminism" of the career woman, wearing wide-shouldered jackets to look more masculine, and lowering her voice to sound more masculine, and eschewing emotionality in favour of being "hard-nosed", and tearing down other women in order to be accepted as one of the guys.

Reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; near the beginning he talks about some oppressed people identifying with their oppressor, wanting to merely take over from them rather than deconstruct the framework of oppression.