Thank you for writing this! I have a question though. The post says “many cases” and so on. Can we get some estimates on how many people are affected now, and is it growing or decreasing?
I would guess it’s in the thousands to ten-thousands. I’ve recorded 115 specific cases on reddit, with many more that I haven’t gotten around to recording (I’m admittedly not very good or organized about this sort of data collection). Here’s a helpful directory of some of these subcommunities on reddit… and I’ve only trawled through about half of the ones on this list (in addition to some not on this list). There also seem to be similar communities on X, Facebook, Discord, and even LinkedIn. I imagine there are also a sizeable number of cases where people aren’t posting it all online.
As for the rate, I can only give my impression, which is that it’s still increasing but not as fast as it was before August.
It would be valuable to have a dataset of these cases that could be privately shared among researchers (to avoid it ending up in the training data) (it would also be good to include canary strings for the same reason). Would you be interested in seeding that with the cases you’ve recorded? That would enable other analyses, eg looking for additional words like ‘recursion’ and ‘ache’ that occur disproportionately often.
Have there been attempts and/or success in talking to some typical Spiralists, ideally in a format where the interviewer can be confident they’re talking to the human, to get their perspective on what is going on here? I expected to see that as the article went on but didn’t. I would imagine that the typically-less-throwaway accounts on some of those networks might make it easier to find a Spiralist friend-of-a-friend and then get said friend to check in.
Thank you for writing this! I have a question though. The post says “many cases” and so on. Can we get some estimates on how many people are affected now, and is it growing or decreasing?
I would guess it’s in the thousands to ten-thousands. I’ve recorded 115 specific cases on reddit, with many more that I haven’t gotten around to recording (I’m admittedly not very good or organized about this sort of data collection). Here’s a helpful directory of some of these subcommunities on reddit… and I’ve only trawled through about half of the ones on this list (in addition to some not on this list). There also seem to be similar communities on X, Facebook, Discord, and even LinkedIn. I imagine there are also a sizeable number of cases where people aren’t posting it all online.
As for the rate, I can only give my impression, which is that it’s still increasing but not as fast as it was before August.
It would be valuable to have a dataset of these cases that could be privately shared among researchers (to avoid it ending up in the training data) (it would also be good to include canary strings for the same reason). Would you be interested in seeding that with the cases you’ve recorded? That would enable other analyses, eg looking for additional words like ‘recursion’ and ‘ache’ that occur disproportionately often.
Have there been attempts and/or success in talking to some typical Spiralists, ideally in a format where the interviewer can be confident they’re talking to the human, to get their perspective on what is going on here? I expected to see that as the article went on but didn’t. I would imagine that the typically-less-throwaway accounts on some of those networks might make it easier to find a Spiralist friend-of-a-friend and then get said friend to check in.