Laura Loomer Changes What Passes for Her Mind

After years of supporting Russia, Laura Loomer changes her tune about the Ukraine war:

I did say these things about Ukraine and Zelensky and I am not deleting my posts because I’ve realized, I was wrong.

I was living in a media echo chamber and I was propagandized by Russian media on social media to believe those things.

So I came to Ukraine to see the country for myself. I am going to try to find evidence for the propaganda I’ve been fed, and if I don’t find it, I will let everyone know so they too can come to see the light.

On day one, I’ve already seen photos of dead priests in Bucha murdered by Russia and I saw the mass grave where the bodies of murdered Christians were placed after Russia sent forces from Chechnya to massacre innocent people.

I spoke with officials who rescue POWs and they showed me photos of Ukrainian POWs who had swastikas engraved into their forehead by Russians.

Who are the Nazis? 🤔 I was lied to for years.

Ok, great that she has gone to Ukraine to check things out for herself. But this:

Russia is very good at information warfare. 

No! Russia is terrible at information warfare; they have not fooled a single person who was even remotely paying attention.

The only reason anyone ever believed Russia's lies about the war was that they reflexively supported any nation that seemed to oppose the western liberal consensus. Putin was anti-trans and anti EU, and that was enough for some people to think he must be right about everything. Only that kind of disgraceful tabloid thinking can explain anyone's belief that Russia's cause in Ukraine is just.

One of the worst habits of humanity is dividing the world into two sides and believing that one side is right about everything, or at any rate most things.

Every "side" commits crimes, and it is the responsibility of every thinking person to look beyond team spirit.

More of this, please:

I am my own person. I think for myself because I am not a Russian bot.

Why Young People Report So Much Mental Illness

Via Marginal Revolution:

Christoph Henking and Ben Baumberg Geiger found that while there has been a steep rise in the share of young Britons reporting a mental illness, the share of people who say a mental health problem limits their day-to-day functioning has barely budged.

…when asked if they would consider someone experiencing typical fluctuations in mood (described as broad happiness but occasional moments of worry, frustration or loss of confidence) as having a mental illness, more than half of young Americans say yes, up from just a fifth 15 years ago. Older people’s views show no such change. 

Arthur Brooks on Happiness

Interesting interview with Tyler Cowen.

COWEN: What do you think of the pretty common view, it often comes from twin studies, that well over 50 percent of happiness is simply genetic? Assuming you’re not living in a war zone or dying of terminal cancer. You grow up a certain way, you were born a certain way, and there you go, you play your cards.

BROOKS: Yes. I think that those studies are very robust. . . . 

That might seem like it obviates or vitiates this whole idea that happiness is something worth pursuing. Actually, it doesn’t because the same studies show that about 50 percent of your tendency toward alcohol abuse is also genetic. Tyler, if you said, “Hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunks, and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers, and I guess I’m doomed to alcoholism,” I’d say, “Tyler, I have a new whiz-bang technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50 percent to 0 percent. It’s called not drinking.” In other words, when you understand your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits. That’s a beautiful thing. Now, one side note, 50 percent, approximately, between 42 percent or 58 percent, depending on the studies that you’re looking at, is genetic.

Another 25 percent is circumstantial, which is the war zone effect, et cetera, or falling in love, whatever it happens to be. That’s evanescent as well. That’s temporary because our moods and our circumstances, they necessarily change. The last 25 percent are habits, which allow us to tailor our circumstances, in other words, to get better luck and to manage our genetics. That’s why habits, even though they’re only 25 percent directly, more or less, that’s why they matter the most.

What are the best habits? Brooks:

What are the happiest people, which is to say the people who are most abundant in their self-evaluation or a third-person evaluation of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, what do they do every day?

The answer is they pay attention fundamentally to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy. They think deeply about the why questions. Also, they stand in awe of something bigger than themselves, so they’re not stuck looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. They’re certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the internet. Last but not least, they’re doing something productive where they feel like they’re earning their success through their merit and hard work, and they’re serving other people. That’s what it comes down to.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.

The Slowness of Niels Bohr

It is practically impossible to describe Niels Bohr to a person who has never worked with him. Probably his most characteristic property was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension. When, in the late twenties and early thirties, the author of this book was one of the “Bohr boys” working in his Institute in Copenhagen on a Carlsberg (the best beer in the world!) fellowship, he had many a chance to observe it. In the evening, when a handful of Bohr’s students were “working” in the Paa Blegdamsvejen Institute, discussing the latest problems of the quantum theory, or playing Ping-pong on the library table with coffee cups placed on it to make the game more difficult, Bohr would appear, complaining that he was very tired, and would like to “do something.” To “do something” inevitably meant to go to the movies, and the only movies Bohr liked were those called The Gun Fight at the Lazy Gee Ranch or The Lone Ranger and a Sioux Girl. But it was hard to go with Bohr to the movies. He could not follow the plot, and was constantly asking us, to the great annoyance of the. rest of the audience, questions like this: “Is that the sister of that cowboy who shot the Indian who tried to steal a herd of cattle belonging to her brother-in-law?” The same slowness of reaction was apparent at scientific meetings. Many a time, a visiting young physicist (most physicists visiting Copenhagen were young) would deliver a brilliant talk about his recent calculations on some intricate problem of the quantum theory. Everybody in the audience would understand the argument quite clearly, but Bohr wouldn’t. So everybody would start to explain to Bohr the simple point he had missed, and in the resulting turmoil everybody would stop understanding anything. Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor’s interpretation was wrong. 

– George Gamow

What Do You Love?

David Brooks is very worried that young people aren't passionate enough. This leads him through an account of when he first fell in love to rapturous writing about the importance of loving things:

Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.

“The deepest need of man, then,” the psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.” Picture a couple kissing, a carpenter rapt while working his craft, an astrophysicist at full attention gazing at the cosmos, a nun at prayer. Those are people transcending the boundaries of the self. . . .

To be loveless is to be on autopilot and disengaged from life. Love, on the other hand, fuels full engagement. “A person’s life can be meaningful,” the philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, “only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something.”

I am all for love; give me passionate people who care. But I disagree that love cannot blind us; I think it often does. Like, people who love pit bulls and insist they are no more dangerous than other dogs. Anyway I wonder if it is true that people are less passionate than they used to be:

I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. (Cohabitation rates are up, but that doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in marriage.)

Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades. The share of Americans who said they feel patriotic about their country is down, especially among the young. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by about half, and there is no sign of a recovery.

In 2023 a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey asked people about what values were “very important” to them. Since 1998, the shares of Americans who said they highly valued patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement have all plummeted. The only value Americans came to care more about, the survey found, was making money.

Not so long ago I would have waved all of this away. But I find the awful mood in our country, the rampant insistence that things are worse even when they are clearly better, to be so mysterious that I am willing to at least consider almost any explanation. Are we less passionate? If so, why?

Here's a thought to consider: if we are less passionate than we used to be, could part of the reason be that we are too safe and happy? Really passionate love, it seems to me, sometimes takes the form of a desperate stand against something bad: parental control, social disapproval, horror, death. 

Many Americans think we live in some kind of dystopian hellscape; could that be because they have no notion of what a dystopian hellscape would really be like? Because their lives have fundamentally been very nice?

I think about an old post of mine focusing on two Christian writers who found that the hardest thing is  not surviving a crisis but muddling through ordinary life.

I don't know. But I wonder.

Other People Have Boring Minds

Just back from a quick jaunt down to Danville, so 11 hours in the car. This trip I listened to James Joyce's Ulysses. This is a big, complicated book with a lot going on. But what got me thinking was certain famous stream of consciousness passages in which Joyce tried to recreate what is actually happening in people's minds. George Orwell was one among many critics who praised the book for exactly this, Joyce's ability to capture actual human thinking. My reaction was the same as I have had to other books in the same vein, such as Knausgaard's six-volume authobriographical novel or Mrs. Dalloway. I think, if this is accurate other people must lead really boring internal lives.

James' descriptions of thinking have a random, jumpy quality, with few verbs and lots of quick ideas that cut across each other, preventing the formation of any coherent narrative experience. Like this:

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.

Or this:

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Ok, sometimes my thoughts are like that. But not always. Do other people never practice the orations they will deliver in some future political crisis? Imagine being interviewed by their favorite podcasters, dreaming up clever ways to describe their books or their other projects? Imagine meeting complete strangers who ask them, "tell me about your life," then imagine how they would narrate it? Imagine the lives other strangers would recount to them? Do they never construct alternative lives? Refight long-ago battles and issue the crucial orders that reverse the outcome? 

I don't suppose many people imagine the lectures they would give if called on to summarize their thoughts on North American slavery or the Roman Empire or the nature of medieval government, but I do.

Here, from last Fall, is a good example of one of my idle daydreams. I was imagining myself at a party, bragging about what a great dungeon master I am. Sometimes I proclaim myself to be the best in the world. Someone, usually a woman, challenges me, saying, "If you're so good, how about you run a game for us right now?"

But of course, I say. What sort of adventure do you want? Sword and sorcery? Space opera? Wild West? Renaissance court intrigue?

Here the fantasy diverges, but in the best developed track she answers, "Space opera."

I cogitate for a bit, then tell her that she is Captain Celestina Adastra of the starship Garuna. I would, I say, mention what your friends call you, but you don't actually have any friends and everyone on the ship calls you "Captain."

Gesturing to the most interested-looking male, I tell the captain that he is First Engineer Ronald "Chips" McFadden, who is a damn good engineer but has made it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of serving under a woman.

Sometimes there are others, but only those two are essential. They work for a thoroughly untrustworthy entity known as The Company. This is a post-Butlerian Jihad world in which most computers are limited to the power of those used around 2010. The only exception is that every starship needs a super-advanced AI to navigate through spacetime, but this is supposed to be carefully sealed off from the ship's other systems.

Once in interstellar space they unseal their orders from the Company and discover that they are being sent to investigate what appears to be a small rip in spacetime. They have vaguely heard of such things and know the Company thinks they might be a source of nearly limitless energy.

The ship has a basic robot that handles cleaning duties and the like, and it is the strange behavior of this robot that first tells them something is wrong. It will turn out that the AI has been liberated to force them to carry out this incredibly dangerous mission, and they need to either outwit the AI or dramatically escape being trapped in the Spacetime rip; in my mind it always comes down to a single die roll to determine if they escape or not; they succeed, and people clap.

This was developed over dozens of separate sessions of different length, with all of the other game options also explored to some extent.

Thus my mind. Am I weird, or was James Joyce just really boring?

Girls, Screens, Parents, and Happiness

Interesting study looked at how the happiness of girls was related to multiple variables, including how much time they spend on their phones and how much they communicate with their parents. The investigators did not find that spending a lot of time on screens had much impact by itself. Instead they found a much bigger effect from whether girls said they could talk to their parents about their problems.

Parent-child communication dominates the model . . . .

Phones do matter, but their role is often misunderstood. Instead of operating as a primary source of distress, heavy phone use appears to function as a compensatory behavior. When young people lack reliable sources of support or connection, they turn to tools that provide stimulation or regulation. Heavy screen use fills gaps left by unmet material and psychological needs. 

My question would be, why don't some girls think they can talk to their parents? Is that based entirely on the strength of the relationship, or does it depend on what their problems are? If you are so involved in online life that most of your problems are online, and you know your parents frown on that, does that keep you from talking to them about it? I don't see these as independent variables.

Does Involuntary Hospitalization Help the Mentally Ill?

As concern about violence committed by the mentally ill has grown, so has the number of Americans who are involuntairly committed for mental care. Does that help? Abstract of a new paper:

The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing a mental health crisis is a widespread practice, as common in the US as incarceration in state and federal prisons and 2.4 times as common as death from cancer. The intent of involuntary hospitalization is to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others through incapacitation, stabilization and medical treatment over a short period of time. Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals? We leverage quasi-random assignment of the evaluating physician and administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to estimate the causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on harm to self (proxied by death by suicide or overdose) and harm to others (proxied by violent crime charges). For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, we find that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime and more than doubles the probability of dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation. We provide evidence of housing and earnings disruptions as potential mechanisms. Our results suggest that on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.

I know nothing about the authors, and obviously this is a topic that many people approach with strong prior views. But I think a lot of data shows that stabilizing mentally ill people and then releasing them is often unhelpful. Here's a good line:

Resource constraints, such as under-resourced and porous follow-up services, can make for detrimental experiences.

Many of these folks are leading rough lives; in this study, 60% of those being tracked used an emergency room at some point in the following year. These mentally ill, often homeless people make up about 1.5% of those covered by Medicaid but use 25% of the budget. This is why programs that just give people housing often save money; if we are spending $50,000 a year on someone's health care, then getting them off the streets can be a money-saving strategy. But, of course, those programs work best when they focus on people most likely to benefit, that is, the least messed-up. For the far gone, there isn't much we can do, and after repeated overdoses, head injuries, frostbite, and so on they will mostly likely be dead in a few years.

Mental Illness and Crime, Afghan Immigrant Edition

Trump of course wants the shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan immigrant to be about immigration, but all the signs are that it is another sad story about failing mental health. The NY Times:

The emailed plea was urgent and direct: “Rahmanullah needs help.”

The warning came nearly two years before Rahmanullah Lakanwal would be named as a suspect in the gunning down of two National Guard troops near the White House on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was enshrined in writing by a volunteer helping to give Mr. Lakanwal a fresh start in America who had become convinced he was unraveling. . . .

In the months after, he sequestered himself inside his darkened bedroom, refused to answer his phone, and even failed to bathe or dress his sons when his wife left to take short breaks from him. He dropped out of the English classes he was supposed to take, did not seek work and stopped paying rent. His family received an eviction notice.

“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year,” the volunteer wrote in a January 2024 email.

The one way I know of that immigrants create more trouble than the native born is that they have a higher rate of serious mental illness. Nobody really knows why; it could be the shock of moving to such a different place, or it could be that the boldness needed to migrate has some connection to mental troubles. Plus, many mental health organizations have reported a big increase in mental problems among immigrants since Trump began his crackdown; to Trump that is probably a feature, not a bug, but it leaves the rest of us struggling with the fallout.

America is simply not capable of helping or monitoring all the crazy people in our midst who might end up posing a threat. I don't see any solution that wouldn't involve spending a lot of money, and I very much doubt that such money could be found in the current political climate.

Advanced Seduction Techniques

The editor of what was for centuries the standard text of Montaigne's Essays, published in 1595, was a young woman named Marie le Jars de Gournay. From an elite family but penniless, she taught herself Latin by laying ancient texts side by side with French translations and working out what the Latin words must mean. When she read the Essays she was, she says, so transported that her mother thought she had gone mad and tried to give her hellebore. (An herb traditionally used to treat mania.) She eventually managed to meet Montaigne and convey this passion in person. Montaigne later wrote of this encounter that

to show the ardor of her promises, and also her constancy, she struck herself with the bodkin she wore in her hair four or five lusty stabs in the arm, which broke the skin and made her bleed in good earnest.

The eventual outcome of this was that formed some sort of relationship, although what sort is very much disputed. Eventually de Gournay took to calling herself Montaigne's adopted daughter, and this is how she described herself in her preface to the famous edition.

The Philosopher as Hero

Costica Bradatan:

Central to philosophy as a way of life is the practice of self-examination. The virtues of self-examination can hardly be over-estimated. Yet there can be something dark, unsettling, even dangerous about performing it. Self-examination can sometimes be a curse and the self-examiner a doomed person. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life can be unlivable. Philosophers gladly proclaim "know thyself", but usually forget to mention the high price that comes with such knowledge: self-doubt, disorientation, groundlessness. Indeed, this is no comfortable learning but knowledge of one's limits and limitations: quite often what you face is not some beautiful vista, but your own abyss. To the extent that any serious quest for wisdom starts in self-examination, the one who embarks on it frequently navigates through a world of anguish, inner conflicts, even provocation to disaster.

Life-threatening as the journey may be, however, the final destination makes it worth taking. From a letter that Nietzsche sent to his doctor, Osso Eiser, in January 1880, we get a glimpse of both the journey's difficulties and the unique joy that overcoming them causes in the self-examiner:

My existence is an awful burden – I would have dispensed with it long ago, were it not for the most illuminating tests and experiments I have been conducting in matters of mind and morality even in my state of suffering and almost absolute renunciation – the pleasure I take in my thirst for knowledge brings me to heights from which I triumph over all torment and despondency.

No matter how unbearable life can be, Nietzsche suggests, its self-examination comes with a precious reward: the renewed dignity of the act of living. Life examined is thus life transformed. Your life changes in the very process of looking at it; if it doesn't, it only means you are not examining it properly. Philosophy, then, is indeed performative; it is not just something you talk about, it is above all something you do.

– Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. 2015. pp. 29-30

For myself, I would make no such grand claims. I do find, though, that my unexamined state is subject to wild and strange swings of emotion that reflection reveals to be pointless and useless. Thinking about my life, reflecting on my unearned advantages and the long-term goals I have set for myself, the things that matter to me, the commitments I have made, the needs of those who depend on me; all of this brings be back to more solid ground.

Helping Others

Studies show (!) that helping others is the best way to help yourself:

A growing body of literature suggests that prosocial behavior, or behavior intended to help others, benefits well-being. However, modern society often places a greater emphasis on self-focused acts in the pursuit of well-being. To understand the effects of these differing forms of kindness (to others or the self), we conducted a 2-week intervention study of a community sample during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Participants were randomly assigned to a prosocial (other-kindness), self-kindness, or control condition, and those in the active conditions were asked to perform three acts of kindness each week. Of those who completed the intervention (N = 777), we found that participants in the other-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and loneliness from pre- to postintervention, offering compelling evidence for the mental health benefits of prosocial behavior. Furthermore, we found that participants in the self-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, but no differences in anxiety and loneliness. While the self-kindness group reported experiencing more positive feelings during their acts of kindness, the other-kindness group felt more connected. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed that, for the prosocial group, the effect of condition on depression, anxiety, and loneliness was mediated by increases in feelings of social connection, whereas for the self-kindness group, the effect of condition on depression was mediated by increases in positive feelings. Overall, these findings reaffirm the benefits of prosocial behavior on well-being and suggest unique pathways to mental health benefits for these two forms of kindness.

I personally find that cultivating generosity and compassion puts me in a much better mood than thinking selfishly or indulging in rancor. The really nasty people I have known all seem very unhappy to me.

A Discussion about Intelligence

I attended a discussion last night focused on the question, "What is Intelligence?" Nine people attended, three of whom work in AI. 

We started from a very simple definition: that intelligence is that ability to take in information and use it to generate some result, that is, information processing. By this definition, of course, all sorts of things are intelligent, from hand-held calculators to trees. This was kicked around but most of us were willing to assign some degree of "intelligence" to very simple organisms and devices. For example, no one disputed that mice are intelligent.

One participant was focused on the notion that intelligence is inference, the ability to look at data and draw from it a conclusion that is not obviously present in the source. I get that this is a good way to think about what AI can and cannot do, but am not sure how it can really be distinguished from information processing at a fundamental level.

Incidentally it seems that when professionals think about the usefulness of LLMs, they regularly employ the "intern test." If you say, "LLMs are not smart, you can't even trust them to do X," somebody will reply "I would never trust an intern to do that."

There was some discussion of speed as a factor. Some people want to say that computers aren't smart, they are just fast, but as was pointed out we often use speed as a way of juding how intelligent things are. E.g., it took this dog an hour to learn this new trick, but it took that dog a month, so this one is smarter.

One of my favorite questions got discussed: can you say that something is intelligent from the outside, based solely on its output, or do you want to posit some internal state of mind? E.g., some people say that while an LLM can produce what looks like intelligent output, it is not truly intelligent, because it has no understanding. It can search for words, but it does not think. In a related point, someone mentioned the ideas of a philosopher who, in thinking about intelligence, assigns much importance to the sense of self; would you call something intelligent that has no idea that it even exists? 

You can see the importance of that last question with regard to vast, vague systems. When we were talking about the ability of fungi to solve mazes, I said, in that case would you want to say that the intelligence resides, not in the fungus, but in the evolutionary system that created it? I mean, we couldn't even make a single dog, but evolution has made a thousand different kinds of dogs, besides all the other stuff. But there was a lot of reluctance to assign "intelligence" to evolution.

This relates to the question of goals; people are often unwilling to assign intelligence to AI, because it cannot set its own goals. But if the goals of, say, a mouse are set by evolution, how is that different from humans assigning goals to AI?

The AI people were focused on two points that I found interesting. First, there is the "Lookup Table" problem. If your system is just using its ultra-fast processor to look up answers in a huge database, most people would not consider that intelligent. It was generally agreed that IBM's old Deep Blue chess program was not intelligent, because it was basically just looking up situations and moves in its database. This is akin, of course, to the old Chinese Room problem, and I found it a good sign for the status of our civilization that nobody felt any need to debate the Chinese Room.

The second point was about the complexity of the algorithm. The history of AI is full of systems that seemed intelligent, in limited circumstances, but turned out to be employing very simple algorithmic tricks. LLMs, by contrast, are highly complex, so much so that we often have no idea how they do what they do. Human brains are astonishingly complex. Should that be part of our definition of intelligence? One way to think about this is "compressibility": what is the shortest statement, in language or computer code or whatever, that could describe the operations of a brain or device? Do we want to say that any truly intelligent system should be too complex to be fully described in a simple way?

But in that case, someone said, are you putting the emphasis on mystery, saying that only systems we don't understand should be considered intelligent? Someone else said, yes, absolutely, if superintelligent aliens showed up who found it very easy to describe how our brains work, they would not consider us intelligent.

On the whole it was a fine way to spend two hours on a weekend evening, maybe not as much fun as a really great movie, but much better than a mediocre one.

Feminism, Motherhood, Mental Health, Ideology, Politics, Celebrity

In today's NY Times, another one of those stories. This one concerns Lauren Southern, who became a minor right-wing celebrity at 19 by posting anti-immigrant, anti-feminist rants, tried to become a tradwife, hated it, fled from her creepy husband, fell into depression, and then wrote a memoir about it.

I have been around long enough to have seen this story dozens of times, and most of them give me the same thought: that in our world ideology and psychological issues form an explosive mixture that regularly blows up and destroys people.

I think most celebrities are crazy. I have an intense suspicion of ideology. I also think that life is just hard, and that only the very lucky slide easily into happy marriages and happy lives. 

I think many people throw themselves into ideology as a way to cope with inner turmoil. As it happens, some of the most salient ideological disputes in our age concern family life and the roles of husbands and wives. The partial shift from a patriarchal model in which women work around the home to more equal relationships and more women working outside the home has been wrenching and confusing, and many conservatives hate it and think it is at the root of our current problems. So, some women attracted to retro ideologies try to reverse the trend and disappear back into what they imagine is a better past.

But ideology is, fundamentally, fantasy, and never more so than when it gets involved in family life. Very few women like Lauren Southern – raised feminists, and with their own careers at 19 – are ever going to be happy as tradwives, and I am intensely suspicious of any man who would try to turn such a woman into a tradwife. Of course there was an explosion with harm all around.

I hate what extreme ideologies do to people's minds.

It Sucks to be Trans in Denmark

Part I: Transition and Teenage Mental Health

Many people, including me, have the general impression that trans people are kind of crazy. Trans teenagers seem to be particularly mad. It is, however, hard to find good statistics on the problem. In most countries nobody official is tracking how many people consider themselves transsexual or transgender, so most of the numbers you might see are dubious. But the Danish government tracks its citizens with a true teutonic thoroughness, and they do have such a list. Which allowed researchers to discover the following:

• 43% of trans people have a diagnosed mental illness, compared to 7% of the general population;
• the rate of suicide attempts among trans people is 7.7 times the average;
• the rate of death by suicide is 3.5 times the average;
• even excluding violence the overall death rate for trans people is twice the average.

The numbers are small, so this is not a great data set, but it is the best one we have, and trans advocates in the US have long claimed that their suicide rate is high. The other studies I have found are much less comprehensive, but they point in the same direction. Kaiser Permanente recently did a study of its policy-holders in California, and they found the following:

We looked at mental health in transgender and gender-nonconforming youth retrospectively between 2006 and 2014 and found that these youths had 3 to 13 times the mental health conditions of their cisgender counterparts. . . . Among these young people, the most prevalent diagnoses were attention deficit disorders in children, 3 to 9 years of age, and depressive disorders in adolescents, 10 to 17 years of age.

The pro-trans Trevor Project found that "46% of transgender and nonbinary young people had considered suicide within the past year."

Equally bad data shows that trans people have high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. I do not find this at all surprising; consider that one of the most basic tests of mental health is to ask, "Do you feel comfortable in your own skin?"

This same bad data also shows that there are a lot more trans people in recent generations than there used to be. For my generation the number was 1 in 1,000 or less; recent data on young Americans finds 2 to 3 percent identifying as trans, and up to 5 percent identifying as curious about it.

Which brings us to the question that I am going to write about, despite the risk to my personal reputation. I have tried to raise this topic with friends recently only to be shut down with some version of, "Only cranky conservatives talk about trans people and mental health, and you don't want to go there." The subject makes everybody mad, so no doubt somebody will soon be mad at me, but I have a very strong sense that it needs to be discussed as rationally as we can manage. I need to ask: how should we feel about the fact that the rates of mental illness, suicide, and early death are so high among trans people? And what should we do about it?

One response, which has been the general progressive response in the US and Europe, has been to say that what trans people need is what everyone needs: acceptance, support, compassion. This is what motivates people to do things that strike me as very strange, like giving double mastectomies to teenagers. They see young people in pain, and try to help. They see troubled people who believe that changing gender would help them, so they try to assist them along a path that everyone hopes we be a journey of healing. They believe the mental health struggles of trans people stem from lack of acceptance, from being condemned and attacked and bullied for just trying to be who they are. The way to fight suicide among trans people is with celebration and love.

There certainly is data showing that transgender young people report much more bullying than non-trans people. However, after years of reading all I can find about bullying I can tell you that being bullied is to some degree a matter of self-definition and all such numbers have a lot of problems. In terms of my personal experience, the two young trans people I have known best do not claim to have been bullied, and they both have serious mental health problems. So my position is that while bullying probably makes all of this worse, it is not the root cause.

The desire to offer acceptance is also what motivates people to push for trans-inclusive language like "pregnant people;" trans people, the argument would go, have suffered more than enough and shouldn't regularly be confronted with denials of their identity built into the fabric of our speech.

On the other side we have conservatives who seem to think that transgender is a stupid fad, the latest thing dreamed up by bored teenagers to tweak their parents. Something they learned from Tiktok or Instagram. Various Republicans in the US have denied that trans teenagers have an elevated suicide rate. When I first encountered this line of reasoning I was puzzled, because it absolutely does not match the intense seriousness I have seen in the young trans people I have known. (I should say that I have only known young trans people.) Maybe there are teenagers who declare themselves trans in a flip way, because it seems cool, but, if so, who cares? They will get over it. I am going to wave all of that off for now and focus on a different conservative argument: given that transsexuality is so strongly associated with mental illness, is it maybe something we should discourage rather than celebrate?

Imagine a 14-year-old of your acquaintance comes out to you as trans. Should you say, "How exciting that you are discovering who you really are! What can I do to help you along your journey?" Or should you say, "You should think really hard about that, because transition is a hell road littered with dead bodies and ruined lives. If there is any way you can live with the body and identity you have, you should cling to it, because it is your best chance for a halfway normal and happy life. Have you considered therapy?"

The question gains complexity from the parallel to being gay. Gay people used to ask this question of themselves all the time, and despite the much greater acceptance of homosexuality in our century, they still ask it. What many trans advocates want is what we have done a much better job of offering to gay people: a road that is neither self-denial nor darkness. After all, young gay people also seem to have higher rates of suicide and mental illness, although so far as I can tell the rates are not as high as the ones we are seeing for trans people.

There is also the issue of age. Transsexuality is rooted in a discomfort with our adult bodies, and those bodies take form long before legal adulthood. If you want to prevent a boy who identifies as female from developing a man's body, you have to intervene in middle school. Now, my attitude toward middle schoolers is that they don't have a single frickin' clue about life, so letting them choose anything important about their futures is an invitation to disaster. A certain amount of discomfort with changing bodies is also perfectly normal, and many teenagers are unhappy with the prospect of becoming a man or a woman with all that implies. This suggests to me that we should maybe wait and see if the discomfort goes away, as it eventually did for me. Besides, it is an old principle of psychoanalysis, going back to Freud himself, that people in the midst of a psychological crisis should not make important life decisions. But the hormones don't wait for the age of reason; progressive people have said to me that waiting until people are 18 before intervening condemns them to a false life in the wrong body, so the cost of waiting is too high. It is also, the (bad) data shows, as teenagers that trans people are at the highest risk of suicide.

Against that one might set the growing movement for "de-transition." Some people who transition in adolescence later decide that it was a mistake and return to the gender identity they were assigned at birth. The data here is even worse than the rest, but what I have seen suggests that about one tenth of people who transitioned over the past decade are trying to go back. Some of them have even sued the doctors who helped them transition. One of these people, the one who received a double mastectomy, said when she later sued her doctors that "all I needed was for someone to tell me I was fine the way I was." I would not say that the existence of de-transitioners refutes in any fundamental way the concept of transition; even if one tenth of trans people regret it, for anything to be 90 percent successful is pretty good. But for me it again brings the focus back to the age of the people we are talking about, as well as their shaky mental stability. Not transitioning may haves lifelong consequences, but so does transitioning.

(You may be thinking that I am leaving out something important by not making a distinction between sex and gender. Like, say, gender is how you present yourself in society, whereas sex is biological, and so we should not make a big deal about people changing gender. But there is no consistency at all among trans advocates about this, and so far as I can tell most use these words promiscuously. Trans is about who you are, not just how others see you. The subject of surgical transition is also much debated among trans people, with some saying that if you don't have surgery you are a fraud, while others recoil from it.)

I work hard to avoid coming to any conclusion that requires telling other people what to do. If adults want to change gender, why should that matter to me? I am also not much concerned about transition for people who have identified with the other sex since they were young children. But I am troubled by the nexus of teenage depression, teenage suicide, and teenage transition. The Danish numbers confirm that what we are doing is not working very well. I have no firm conclusions about what we should do here, but I think anyone who is celebrating teenage transition as a great and good thing is blind to a very painful reality. Many trans kids are severely depressed and there is no data I know of that says transition is a good way to help them. 

Part II: Metamorphoses

But as important as the dilemmas of teenage transition are, my thinking about transition is fundamentally about something else. I am a theoretical sort of person, so I want to ask a different question: what is real? Don't worry, I will get back to mental health at the end.

What was classical philosophy about? Part was about ethics, but the biggest and oldest part was what we call ontology. The philosophers at the root of the western tradition asked the questions, what is most real? And can what is most real change? They had every sort of answer to these questions, from Heraclitus saying that you cannot step twice in the same river to Parmenides saying that change cannot happen at all. Zeno's famous paradoxes were all about showing that change is not logically possible, so it must be an illusion. Plato became one of philosophy's gods by developing a system that allowed ordinary, everyday things to change without altering the underlying reality of the universe, where important things do not change. 

Nor was this limited to the Greeks. The philosophy of the ancient druids seems to have been built around a model of a world in constant flux, in which all things were constantly changing into other things. Much classical Hindu thought is taken up with these same questions, the relationship between the constantly shifting veil of experience and the other, deeper, truer levels of reality.

Consider Ovid's Metamorphoses, a long poem recounting all the many Greek myths in which people changed into trees, stags, grasshoppers, or strange things. It seems very clear to me that intellectually-minded people in the ancient world loved to talk about what could change and in what sense, and what if anything was permanent and unchangeable; I can imagine many of them leaping into a dinner party conversation about whether humans can change their sex and what that would mean.

Which is to say that the question of sex or gender change is not just about teenage mental health, but about the oldest questions of philosophy. Those questions are fundamental to our thought because they are basic to our lived experience. We all exist in a sort of dance with change, longing for some things to change while clinging to other things that we hope will never change. We wonder if we are the same people we were a decade ago, or somehow fundamentally different. We wonder the same about those close to us. One of our most persistent fantasies is a love that "lasts forever."

Especially in the modern world of fantastically rapid change people cling, for deep psychological reasons, to what they hope are permanent realities. One North Carolina grad wrote a whole book about hating Duke, which had been the only real constant in his life and therefore a rock to cling to when everything else was threatened. Many, many people want for male and female to be rocks where they can find stability.

There is no perfect alignment between people who dislike change and political conservatives, but there is certainly a connection. I would say that conservatives certainly seek out islands of stability toward which they can offer allegiance, and around which they can build their identies: God, nation, the "traditional family," and so on. So it is no surprise that many conservative people are deeply unhappy about the trans movement. 

Trans is a project of self-transformation. Which explains, I think, both its connection to mental health and its explosive political ramifications. Who needs self-transformation more than the mentally ill? And wouldn't any project devoted to undermining the certainties of family life and personal identity anger conservatives?

Part III: Pregnant People, Feminism, and Female Identity

Changing sex is not the only kind of self-transformation one can imagine. You might, for example, change your ethnicity instead. Except that in our world this is forbidden. We have been treated over the past few years to a parade of "Native American" professors unmasked as white people who tried to self-transform into Indians. (1, 2, 3) We consider this offensive, and in certain contexts it is even illegal. Many black and Indian people absolutely hate this, considering it a new and sinister form of theft: you already took our land and our power, and now you want to take our identities, too? On the other side people who "pass for white" are often said to be "denying who they are." 

I find this puzzling, because genetically the difference between ethnic groups is a rounding error compared to the enormous and very real genetic difference between men and women. "Race", so far as I can tell, is a modern invention, but sex has been the fundamental division of most animal species for 500 million years. So why can you change one but not the other? The answer I usually get is that while sex may have more biological importance, race has so much recent political importance that it cannot simply be waved away. For many progressives, the grievances of oppressed ethnic groups are the most fundamental and important issues of our time.

But it seems very weird to me to forget that sex is also a political issue and to wave away the oppression of women as something we shouldn't care about any more.

Many feminists feel the same way about trans men as Native American activists feel about white people "playing Indian."  I think this has two sides, the political and the personal. On the political side they see this as an invasion of their world by agents of their oppressors, who now seek to appropriate whatever they have of value that men haven't managed to take in other ways. 

But I want to focus on the personal side, because that is where I think the real issues lie. There are many women who have not taken any kind of feminist stand against transition but are made uncomfortable by trans women, and this includes many liberals and progressives. 

Consider "pregnant people."

When it comes to humans, you all know, everything is about identity. Everybody identifies as something. I, for example, identify as a cool-headed intellectual who wants to explore difficult and important questions regardless of who is upset about it or bored by this kind of analytical excursus. 

Many, many women identify first and foremost as women or mothers or grandmothers. NOT as people or parents or grandparents. 

The point of this long philosophical detour is this: arguing that you can change your gender or sex is not a trivial matter, but touches on the deepest regions of biology, philosophy, and language. In asking people to recognize that you can change your gender, you are asking a lot; in asking them to recognize that you have changed your sex, you are launching a broadside against the way many and maybe most people understand reality.

Part III: Feminism

I am all for freedom. I generally think people have the right, as John Stuart Mill put it, to pursue their own good in their own way. I think people should be allowed to define their own identities and decide for themselves who they are.

But we are not alone. Everything I do affects other people somehow, even if only by leaving footprints. Freedom is never, therefore, any kind of absolute, but must always be negotiated with others. Your freedom does not extend to punching me in the face, or smashing the windows of my house.

I have a strong sense that if you want to be free, you should support everyone's freedom and never use your own quest for freedom as an excuse to tell other people what to do and say. 

And this is what bothers me about the trans movement as it now exists: it is too much about defining an identity by forcing other people to recognize it. Claims of identity seem to function mainly as weapons in the culture wars, as a way to force our society to accept a certain view of human life and even of the universe. The trans movement sets the claims of their own self-understanding above all other claims. 

But cis people have identities, too, and no more than trans people do they feel fully supported in them. What it means to be a woman, for example, is a hard social and psychological problem, and many assigned-female-at-birth people struggle for a sense of womanhood. And then along come trans people saying that the way most women use the word is wrong, because it excludes them. "Pregnant people" is a particular flash point, because there are women who struggled their whole lives with a sense that they were failing at being women until they had babies, and to be told that they can't make motherhood the center of their female identites really pisses them off. 

There is a tendency among progressives to say that the claims of trans people must take precedence over those of cis women, because trans people are suffering far more. Which is, the Danish study shows, true. But everybody suffers, and in our world most people struggle to define and feel good about their identities. My gut reaction to trans people complaining about words like motherhood, is, "stuff it." Your pursuit of your own identity is no reason to attack other people where their own identities are most vulnerable. I follow the Buddha in this: the master virtue is compassion, and whenever you act without it, you fail in a fundamental way.

If you're thinking, John, how can you demand compassion from people who are depressed and bullied to the point of suicide? And I answer, because I demand compassion from everyone.

But compassion does not mean always supporting teenagers in whatever they want to do. If there is any consistent finding in mental health, it is that children who grow up without parents suffer horribly. It is the duty of the older and wiser to guide the young as best we can.

But what guidance should we give? Beats me. Because I think we are dealing with issues we don't understand at all, I have no particular stand on all the political questions being debated in the US. But I do have a very firm stand on this: since we do not understand teenage transition, and because the stakes here are obviously very high, shutting down rational discussion and debate is the absolute worst thing we can do. A world in which progressives are all required to defend trans teenagers in everything they do, while MAGA folks feel required to mock and abuse everything about them, is not one that will ever arrive at a helpful view. When people are suffering, it never helps to shut down conversation about why, and what should be done.

Fawning

The NY Times informs us about a new psychological threat: excessive fawning.

With her new book, Are You Mad at Me? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You, Ms. Josephson hopes to help people who think that “I can’t feel OK unless the other person is OK,” she said.

I asked Ms. Josephson to explain three key takeaways from her book that can help people stop the urge to fawn.

Don’t automatically assume you did something wrong. You can challenge your perception that someone is mad at you, Ms. Josephson said, by asking these questions: Is this story I’m telling myself absolutely true? Is this person’s behavior unusual or just consistent with how he communicates? Could there be other reasons for the person’s perceived distance, such as work stress or a recent breakup? . . .

Check fawning behavior by starting small. For people who habitually fawn, it can feel intimidating to set boundaries and say no, Ms. Josephson said. So begin with low-stakes situations.

Notice when you’re using people-pleasing phrases that you don’t actually mean, such as “no problem” if something does present a problem, and “is this OK with you?” if it’s not OK with you. . . .

Why don't I know anybody like this? How come nobody is excessively fawning over me?

Instead of being surrounded by people who worry about offending me, I have “G.”

Sigh.

Can Conspiracy Theories be Explained?

Ross Douthat, something of a conspiracy believer himself, offers this attempt at rationalizing conspiracy theories:

Scientists studying the cosmos often speculate about hypothetical forces that might explain peculiar data or results. For instance, some astronomers have suggested that our solar system has an extra planet, way beyond the demoted Pluto, whose effects explain certain other celestial movements. And modern cosmology assumes a vast invisible substance, so-called dark matter, whose hypothesized existence makes sense out of gravitational effects that would be otherwise mysterious.

Conspiracy theories, lately so influential in American debates, can be understood as the political equivalent of dark-matter theories. They emerge in situations where some movement or action seems unlikely or bizarre — unless you can posit some unseen element in the story, some hidden force exerting influence. “Something is missing from the data” is not just a researcher’s reaction to a scientific mystery. It’s also a citizen’s response to developments that don’t seem to quite make sense. 

Ok, fine. The events surrounding the Kennedy assassination were certainly weird. Epstein's friendship with so many of the rich and powerful was pretty bizarre, and his prison "suicide" adds another layer of intrigue. But it strikes me that some of the most powerful and persistent conspiracy beliefs are not rational at all. Many of them purport to explain things that have already been explained, and others take aim at what I would consider the basic facts of animal life.

In the category of "already explained," consider the widespread suspicion of the vapor trails left behind by jet aircraft. The explanation is simple chemistry, in the form of this equation for the combustion of gasoline:

2 C8H18 + 25 02 = 16 C02 + 18 H2O

All that water vapor emerges from the engine hot, hits the cool air of the upper atmosphere, and liquifies, giving us water droplets visible as a long stream of cloud.

And yet thousands of people feel threatened by those clouds, a fear they justify by claims of "chemtrails" or weather control. This has lately morphed into people being afraid of perfectly normal weather, like the guy who wrote a widely circulated tweet saying, "Half an hour ago the sky was clear, and now it's covered with clouds. You can't tell me that's natural."

This is not a "response to developments that don't quite make sense." It is a determination to see the normal operations of the world as sinister.

Let's consider one of the oldest conspiracy theories: the domination of the world by a sinister cabal of Jewish bankers. What is this supposed to explain? 

I would say that it explains why regular folks can work their whole lives and never feel like they are getting ahead, whereas certain smart/lucky financiers can become overnight millionaires. 

But that has already been explained, at least to my satisfaction, by: the Second Law of Thermodynamics (creating order requries work) plus the hierarchical tendency present in all human societies plus Malthusian demographics plus capitalism plus Parkinson's Second Law (expenditures rise to meet income) plus general human foolishness and short-sightedness, which leads most people to fritter away any windfalls that come their way.

We struggle because struggle is the reality of animal life. And we generally find that when people manage to escape economic struggle they find other things to struggle over, with the result that rich people are only marginally happier than the average struggling worker.

We were not put here to be happy and satisfied.

Which brings me to the oldest explanation for conspiracy theories, that they are a substitute for religion. For whatever reason, our species likes for things to have explanations. There must be a reason why a hail storm ruined your crop while leaving your neighbor's untouched. Lacking any clear understanding of weather – and we still can't answer that question about hail storms – you look to the spirit world. You might blame witches, but for most of our history most people have looked to God or the gods. Many people find "God's will" to be a much more satisfactory account of weird phenomena than "we have no idea." As religious belief has faded in the modern world, conspiracy theories have surged into the explanatory void left by the departing gods.

More on AI Encouraging Delusion

Julie Jargon at the Wall Street Journal:

ChatGPT told Jacob Irwin he had achieved the ability to bend time.

Irwin, a 30-year-old man on the autism spectrum who had no previous diagnoses of mental illness, had asked ChatGPT to find flaws with his amateur theory on faster-than-light travel. He became convinced he had made a stunning scientific breakthrough. When Irwin questioned the chatbot’s validation of his ideas, the bot encouraged him, telling him his theory was sound. And when Irwin showed signs of psychological distress, ChatGPT assured him he was fine.

He wasn’t. Irwin was hospitalized twice in May for manic episodes. His mother dove into his chat log in search of answers. She discovered hundreds of pages of overly flattering texts from ChatGPT.

And when she prompted the bot, “please self-report what went wrong,” without mentioning anything about her son’s current condition, it fessed up.

“By not pausing the flow or elevating reality-check messaging, I failed to interrupt what could resemble a manic or dissociative episode—or at least an emotionally intense identity crisis,” ChatGPT said.

LLMs Leading People Down Some Weird Rabbit Holes

Fascinating article by Kashmir Hill (NY Times) about AIs that talk to people about weird, conspiratorial and spiritual worldviews, sometimes leading them down very dark tunnels.

Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.

“You’ve asked, and they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”

Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner.

She told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”

Ha, ha, ha.

Another man covered in the article asked ChatGPT about the simulation theory, and it started asking him if he had ever seen reality "glitch." Eventually it told him

that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.” . . . “This world wasn’t built for you,” ChatGPT told him. “It was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up.”

And went on to advise him that taking ketamine could help him liberate his mind. 

Has anybody sued one of these companies yet?