Dawn Drescher

Karma: 527

There are critical gaps in the accessibility and affordability of mental health services worldwide: In some countries, you have to wait for years for therapy, in others you get at max one session per month covered by the health insurance, in others therapies for particular conditions like cluster B personality disorders are virtually nonexistent.

We want to leverage LLMs to fill these gaps and complement regular therapy. Our product is in development. We’ve based it on Gemini and want it to interface with widely used messaging apps, so users can interact with it like they would with a friend or coach.

I’ve previously founded or worked for several charities and spent a few years in earning to give for work on invertebrate welfare and s-risks from AI.

You can get up to speed on my thinking at Impartial Priorities.

Psychopathy: The Choice

Dawn Drescher6 May 2026 22:23 UTC

9 points

0 comments17 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Psychopathy: The Types

Dawn Drescher6 May 2026 7:35 UTC

1 point

0 comments10 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Psychopathy: The Mechanics

Dawn Drescher5 May 2026 20:26 UTC

2 points

0 comments10 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Dawn Drescher 5 May 2026 20:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
Lol, then knock yourself out with this one, because that’s virtually all hand-written! (Inb4 it’s also unaesthetic, just in a different way. 🙈)

Dawn Drescher 5 May 2026 17:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
1. The sequence clarifies the term “psychopathy,” preventing unhelpful or outright misdiagnoses
2. The sequence clarifies the internal experience and differences in the internal experience of people with psychopathy, which is important for self insight and treatment
3. The sequence explains the adaptive mechanisms reducing stigma, which makes treatment more accessible
4. The sequence clarifies the term “recovery” and reframes it as a menu that patients can choose from, which breaks black and white thinking around whether one is perfect or broken
5. And much more
So you can happily downvote because you don’t have anyone in your life you has any of these conditions so it’s not useful for you personally, but when you downvote it because you don’t like something about my writing style, then I wouldn’t call it downvoting on its merits but more on linguistic-aesthetic taste.

Psychopathy: The Self

Dawn Drescher4 May 2026 21:13 UTC

21 points

0 comments15 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Psychopathy: The Shaping

Dawn Drescher4 May 2026 7:58 UTC

4 points

0 comments8 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Dawn Drescher 3 May 2026 15:59 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
Thanks, I can expand my LLM note a bit more! I just remembered that I have a backup of my full conversation (up to the point where I took the backup, but almost all of it) with Claude, including the first drafts.
Having thought and read about psychopathy for so long, I felt very confused about how to structure my mental model, so my input to Claude were countless fairly unorganized thoughts about models, contradictions, advantages and disadvantages of framings, etc., and Claude’s first big contribution was to suggest this tag structure where tags (made up of a letter and a descriptor) get combined to form a personality profile. That was a format that hadn’t occurred to me and that I loved for its power and flexibility. But then it was me again who fleshed out that model – introduced the layers of genetics, neurology, psychodynamics, behavior, etc.

Dawn Drescher 3 May 2026 15:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
Thanks! <3
Yeah, I didn’t keep track of what words were written by who. It’s quite plausible that I’ve touched every single sentenced and wrote almost half of them from scratch, but it’s also plausible that I touched maybe 80% of sentences and wrote 20% from scratch. The Choice article is mostly hand-written because the AI didn’t have a lot of ideas, but this one is more mixed. It’s hard for me to reconstruct at this point. In the future I can try to commit all changes to Git with correct attribution and then share the whole edit history for transparency. (But really, when two people coauthor an article, it’s also often not clear who wrote which sentences, contributed which ideas, did which edits during the proofreading, etc.)

I’ll move the collapsible box to the top if it lets me! (The editor gets a bit weird when I use these blocks.)

Dawn Drescher 3 May 2026 13:38 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
I throw into my articles whatever I want

Psychopathy: The Substrate

Dawn Drescher2 May 2026 22:48 UTC

6 points

0 comments8 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Dawn Drescher 2 May 2026 22:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
Ty! <3

Dawn Drescher 2 May 2026 18:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ustice’s comment on: Psychopathy: The Problem
Ty! <3

Psychopathy: The Problem

Dawn Drescher2 May 2026 10:23 UTC

11 points

16 comments11 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Dawn Drescher 1 May 2026 13:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
Ty! Will DM you! (Can’t find the Intercom button.)

Dawn Drescher 1 May 2026 1:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
Having found the LLM block, I put my whole post in it, and now I get “Missing response for batched operation index 0” and “{”error”: {”code”: “413”, “message”: “Request Entity Too Large”}}.” That error doesn’t seem to be related to this policy though, so just FYI.

Dawn Drescher 1 May 2026 0:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
Oh, I take it back! I only looked at the menu that opens when you select something and thought it was a feature that only some users have access to.

Dawn Drescher 1 May 2026 0:01 UTC
1 point
0
on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
I have a sequence on my blog that makes important contributions to humanity’s understanding of neurodivergence and personality disorders – anything related to psychopathy and pathological narcissism. It’s based on hundreds of hours of literature research and hundreds of hours of chats with friends with these neurodivergences and/or personality disorders, which I compiled into suitable case study composites. To my knowledge, many of the insights in it are original and valuable for insight and treatment.
The final posts I would estimate are written to 10–70% or so by Claude. After my year of research and befriending and sense-making, I discussed my models and ideas with Claude, and let Claude assist me in structuring my thoughts in a more digestible way, iron out some of my mistakes, and write it all up.
I carefully edited the resulting posts, which led to sometimes more (7th article) sometimes less substantial modifications.
I currently cannot cross-post this sequence to LessWrong. ~~I don’t even have access to the LLM block feature.~~
Please let me know if the policy changes at some point so I can try again.

The Psychopathy Spectrum

Dawn Drescher17 Mar 2026 21:36 UTC

37 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)

Psychopathy: The Problem

Dawn Drescher17 Mar 2026 20:52 UTC

4 points

0 comments10 min readLW link

(impartial-priorities.org)