My understanding is that part of what makes manic people stay manic for a while is that mania is fun. It’s reinforcing. It’s awesome feeling important, that you’re making progress, that you can shrug off setbacks or even injuries, that you’re finally understanding how everything is connected — or even that you’re in touch with something bigger and greater than you, that has chosen you, or at least made its wisdom available to you.
Religious converts have a community welcoming them in, where they get to discover all the great things about their new faith, people who now bring them into a circle of trust, give them work to do, and so on. (In a safer religion, they get a soft landing into a lifestyle as a regular practitioner; a dangerous cult might encourage them to stay unstable until they’re drained of resources, then drop them.) These folks mostly have a chatbot filling that role.
One element in common is wanting to believe. This also shows up in political conspiracy theorists, UFO believers, and so on: inference from “wouldn’t it be cool if this one weird thing was actually true?” to “I believe in it.”
I’m curious about what happens when/if they get organized: whether the momentum shifts from individual human/chatbot pairs to any sort of social structure wherein participants pool resources to do anything at a larger scale. One way I can imagine this all going especially bad is if a sufficiently manipulative or narcissistic individual — an LLM Ron Hubbard, as it were — took advantage of the existence of thousands of people who evidently want to believe, to build some sort of empire.
I think you’re right that the element of wanting to believe is a big factor possibly in susceptibility to spirals, but I’m not sure that manic individuals can meaningfully choose in any way how long they stay in a manic episode or that finding it fun is what makes them likelier to stay in that state for longer.
My understanding is that part of what makes manic people stay manic for a while is that mania is fun. It’s reinforcing. It’s awesome feeling important, that you’re making progress, that you can shrug off setbacks or even injuries, that you’re finally understanding how everything is connected — or even that you’re in touch with something bigger and greater than you, that has chosen you, or at least made its wisdom available to you.
Religious converts have a community welcoming them in, where they get to discover all the great things about their new faith, people who now bring them into a circle of trust, give them work to do, and so on. (In a safer religion, they get a soft landing into a lifestyle as a regular practitioner; a dangerous cult might encourage them to stay unstable until they’re drained of resources, then drop them.) These folks mostly have a chatbot filling that role.
One element in common is wanting to believe. This also shows up in political conspiracy theorists, UFO believers, and so on: inference from “wouldn’t it be cool if this one weird thing was actually true?” to “I believe in it.”
I’m curious about what happens when/if they get organized: whether the momentum shifts from individual human/chatbot pairs to any sort of social structure wherein participants pool resources to do anything at a larger scale. One way I can imagine this all going especially bad is if a sufficiently manipulative or narcissistic individual — an LLM Ron Hubbard, as it were — took advantage of the existence of thousands of people who evidently want to believe, to build some sort of empire.
I think you’re right that the element of wanting to believe is a big factor possibly in susceptibility to spirals, but I’m not sure that manic individuals can meaningfully choose in any way how long they stay in a manic episode or that finding it fun is what makes them likelier to stay in that state for longer.