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Comment Universal positive regard (Score 4, Interesting) 18

Sometimes, to get your thoughts straight, all you need is to discuss them with somebody. Chatbots seem to be just great for this. You really do not need anything from them, you just explain your ideas and this makes them more organized. This is really useful. Especially, now when you really have to be careful what you say to others, or you may end up totally cancelled.

ChatGPT has three aspects that make this practice - what you describe - very dangerous.

Firstly, ChatGPT implements universal positive regard. No matter what your idea is, ChatGPT will gush over it, telling you that it's a great idea. Your plans are brilliant, it's happy for you, and so on.

Secondly, ChatGPT always wants to get you into a conversation, it always wants you to continue interacting. After answering your question there's *always* a followup "would you like me to..." that offers the user a quick way that reduces effort. Ignoring these requests, viewing them as the result of an algorithm instead of a real person trying to be helpful, is difficult in a psychological sense. It's hard not to say "please" or "thank you" to the prompt, because the interaction really does seem like it's coming from a person.

And finally, ChatGPT remembers everything, and I've recently come to discover that it remembers things even if you delete your projects and conversations *and* tell ChatGPT to forget everything. I've been using ChatGPT for several months talking about topics in a book I'm writing, I decided to reset the ChatGPT account and start from scratch, and... no matter how hard I try it still remembers topics from the book.(*)

We have friends for several reasons, and one reason is that your friends will keep you sane. It's thought that interactions with friends is what keeps us within the bounds of social acceptability, because true friends will want the best for you, and sometimes your friends will rein you in when you have a bad idea.

ChatGPT does none of this. Unless you're careful, the three aspects above can lead just about anyone into a pit of psychological pathology.

There's even a new term for this: ChatGPT psychosis. It's when you interact so much with ChatGPT that you start believing in things that aren't true - notable recent example include people who were convinced (by ChatGPT) that they were the reincarnation of Christ, that they are "the chosen one", that ChatGPT is sentient and loves them... and the list goes on.

You have to be mentally healthy and have a strong character *not* to let ChatGPT ruin your psyche.

(*) Explanation: I tried really hard to reset the account back to its initial state, had several rounds of asking ChatGPT for techniques to use, which settings in the account to change, and so on (about 2 hours total), and after all of that, it *still* knew about my book and would answer questions about it.

I was only able to detect this because I had a canon of fictional topics to ask about (the book is fiction). It would be almost impossible for a casual user to discover this, because any test questions they ask would necessarily come from the internet body of knowledge.

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 254

Thus 5x3 becomes 5x5x5 or 3x3x3x3x3 instead of "STFU and memorize your times tables."

I'm fine with the repeated addition. My objection is the OR in your statement. Apparently not. The question was 5x3 and the kid wrote 5+5+5=15 and got marked wrong with no explanation because the teacher wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15. So I guess that you would have had a 50% chance of being marked wrong on a 2nd grade arithmatic worksheet as well, as absurd as that is. Correct answer notwithstanding.

BTW, that's not at all new. We covered multiplication that way in the 3rd grade back in 1975. Memorizing the table was just to make it quicker. I quickly "discovered" the commutative property while looking at the multiplication table and cut my memorization load in half. The part that confused the father was why is 5x3 = 5+5+5=15 "wrong".

As for 37+55, we decomposed that in the '70s as well, but I soon decided the easier decomposition was 37+55= 87+5 = 90+2=92. So I would say that meme was just someone wanting to complain. Of course the "old way" ends up in 30+50+10+2 anyway.

Shut up and memorize was not in practice during the education of the parents of today's students.

Comment Re: Centralized Energy Industry (Score 1) 130

No. I really do not understand your position. You keep using overly simplistic sentences that do not interact in ways that provide concrete meaning. As I have already said though, what does seem to be clear is that you are not advocating any concrete position, so there is not really anything to discuss or any real reason to continue.

Comment Re:The talented ones can (Score 1) 254

It was my example. It came from a photograph of the worksheet posted to Reddit by the child's father, who was wondering why the answer was 'wrong'.

Surely you don't expect the 2nd graders to start on Clifford algebras any time soon. They need to learn to walk before they run. Note that by the time you're multiplying vectors and matrices the process involved is sufficiently different from multiplying real numbers that not being commutative is not going to be an issue. I recall my high school math teacher demonstrating non-commutative multiplication. I was not confused in spite of having figured out the commutative nature of simple multiplication in elementary school.

Comment Re: Case in point (Score 1) 210

The speech to text can be nice (even if my phone keeps writing "free cat" when I say FreeCAD), but it clearly has significant limitations. I still can't even guess why my phone can respond to "flashlight on" but fails at "flashlight off".

It's also amazing that it's possible to draw a metal wire thinner than a human hair and even more amazing that it's possible to drill a neat hold through it's width without breaking it, but I really don't have much use for that day to day.

As for image generation, quick, how many fingers am I holding up on my right hand? (hint: not 6).

Comment Re:Imagine if the COVID vaccine cultists (Score 3, Insightful) 304

The thing is, it wasn't lying. First there wasn't much evidence for the myocarditis, then it was confounded evidence. Did the kid get myocarditis from the vaccine itself, or was it from the beginning of a COVID infection aborted because the immune system was already actively reacting to spike protein at the time.

Of course, over-arching all of that, COVID causes myocarditis too, and often worse so it wasn't all that clear if mild myocarditis from the vaccine would even matter. Try explaining that to people ready to eat horse paste and unsure why people are laughing at Trump's suggestion to inject bleach.

Then there's a question of how much of the distortion came from scientists and how much from journalists (mis-)quoting them?

Now that the data is in, we can see that there is some possibility of mild myocarditis from the vaccine.

The thing about science is that as more data comes in, theories change and so actions suggested by those theories also change. In emergent situations such as the COVID pandemic, data and change can come fast.

Perhaps a sports analogy. After the first baseball game of the year, plenty of batters have an average of 1.000 for the year. Plenty have .000 for the year. That will change a LOT in the next day. By the end of the season, batting averages don't move that much in a single game.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 304

At this rate, I wonder if the only remaining solution is Darwinian (which they also don't believe in). Hopefully some of the unfortunate children of anti-vaxers will learn the truth and get their doctor to give them the shot anyway (but I'm guessing MAGA will move to make the punishment for that worse than for murder).

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