Let’s say you do not want to breastfeed, and you have a good reason for that. Maybe breastfeeding really hurts your nipples, maybe you can’t seem to produce enough milk, maybe it is just really inconvenient given your lifestyle. I would think that this would also be correlated with breastfeeding being a bad choice for you in particular. If it hurts, maybe the bonding doesn’t work. If you don’t produce enough milk, the quality might also be bad, or maybe slight underfeeding causes problems. If it is inconvenient, maybe you will get postpartum depression. It might sound cliche, but this article makes me think that ‘pick whichever you feel like’ is indeed the right algorithm for this.
Togame
So let’s say you are (sort of) an Effective Altruist, I think that describes many people here, including me. And let’s say that you believe that hunger and desperation makes otherwise decent people do horrible things. (I do believe so) And let’s say that you buy supplies over years, which just gets absorbed by the current supply chain and causes no shortages. Then the net effect of your supplies being stolen during a disaster is still that someone gets to eat, who would otherwise just not get to, and that person is probably of average decency. That just seems good? Like, maybe less good than me in particular getting to eat, I am not completely selfless. But ‘your supplies will get stolen’ just doesn’t seem like a very good argument against stockpiling.
Maybe there’s some fancy statistical methods that mitigate this, but from what I know about study design, if 9 women are happy because their period is more manageable/gone, and one woman feels very down because of the hormones, that might show up as ‘no effect on mood’, and then this gets communicated as ‘it definitely does not have an effect on mood, we did proper studies’ even if there is a sizable minority that gets reliably suicidal on it. Not sure if there is a name for this, but I always try to keep this in mind for any drug. Humans are sometimes just very different in how they metabolize things.
I feel like the AI is unduly helped by the format here. I don’t actually consume a whole book one quote at a time, and that is also not the reading experience the author wrote for.
For example, with the literary fiction one, the story about the boy and the church feels sort of complete, like a micro-story, and I think that might be why I prefer it in isolation. You also don’t need to understand anything about these characters before reading, they are just the boy and the grandfather, and that is all they are and all you need to know. But with the quote from the judge, I have this feeling that there is more to this character, even without ever having read the book the quote is from, and that makes me feel a bit disoriented while reading. Am I supposed to agree with this guy? To root for him? Does the wider narrative disprove him? I don’t know, and that makes the quote hard to read.
But I don’t read novels to read fifty cool quotes in a row, I want cohesion, a narrative, character development, some sort of central thesis. Can AIs currently provide that? I doubt it, and this article doesn’t ask.
And I suspect that part of this is also about whether you read the book the human quotes are based on. I don’t know who that judge is, but maybe my disorientation would just disappear if I did, and then the quote would land better. So maybe the survey results are just dominated by people who feel confused about the actual book that sits around the human quotes, and the whole thing is more about how well you know the literary canon they draw from.
(I had 3⁄2 AI preference, 1,1 2,1 3,2 4,1 5,1)
First, I’m not a therapist, and I don’t have OCD so free free to disregard, but I had a thought that might be useful.
Your compulsion is you worrying about X risk, but specifically not doing anything real about X risk, right? Like, the problem is not that you are working on X risk too hard, the problem is that your worries prevent you from doing much of any sort of work. I would try to concentrate on noticing that difference. Like, say you don’t worry about X risk for a day, does that mean you did less on it? If not, then your worries probably don’t do anything productive, and noticing that might help. Maybe this can work within the exposure release therapy framework?
If you think you have something productive to contribute, you might set aside some amount of time to work on it, but then try to quit thinking about it the rest of the time, and then try to notice that that time becomes more productive with less worries at 3 AM.
Obviously the opposite side should become numb, right?