i truly do not think chatgpt can cause schizotypal disorders i think it is just exacerbating them in a way that previously did not exist

i feel fucking horrible for people who get caught up in this

That actually would be a more accurate way to phrase it.

And yeah I realize I phrased it somewhat pithily but this is horrifying in terms of ramifications.

yeah the thing about schizotypal disorders is that they can easily just be latent for someone's entire life until the right trigger comes along and tips the balance from "brain gets a little flighty under pressure, sometimes" into full-on "cannot perceive reality reliably anymore" mode, and usually that takes something that actively breaks their ability

to like, believe in or comprehend a baseline within their own mind of what "reality" or "normal" is and say "this thing that i'm experiencing or learning about can't belong in the real world"

and we are already in a cultural moment where our previous expectations for what can be understood as "normal" are all in rupture, or proving fraudulent, already, and then you add in the pervasiveness and false persuasiveness of LLM hallucinations--

well.

that said, i will note that the other reason this is propagating so rapidly among the techbro enclaves is that many of them are taking copious amounts of psychotropic drugs and pursuing multiple forms of snake-oil pseudoscience and mysticism already, in attempts to "expand their minds" and "unlock their evolutionary potential".

they're also pursuing that for the same reasons a lot of like. "celebrity" figures wind up falling into objectivism and scientology and other cults: being under that much scrutiny and that much social pressure to perform, while conversely having so little of that performance be the result of any actual productive exertion, makes you bored and lonely.

they're alienated, isolated, they have no way to fill the screaming in the back of their brain telling them they always have to justify their idleness, their detachment, the unearned attention, the level to which their ego exceeds their actual relevance or societal value. and they don't want to stop thinking they can keep being "successful" like this.

so they don't do anything that actually contributes to the world around them because they feel too disconnected from it. and also, they're not trying to be humble in a real sense, they're trying to flatter themselves enough that they don't have to consider how little they've actually made of their lives.

so they seek out options that will tell them, instead, that the world revolves around them, that the world is what they want it to be. and LLMs will do exactly that, nothing but that, and double down on it to an exponentially feedback-looping degree, because "returning the results they're prompted to return" is what they're designed for.

and when you have no grounding in other people's lives, you have no ground beneath your feet but the ground you put there. and they've chosen quicksand, because it's easier than looking around. and it's killing them.

yeah im ngp, that's the thing that scares me the most about llms

*ngl

how easy it is to trap people in loops of bad feedback because how can you safely argue against the Confirmation Bias Printer

bc this is about rich people who put themselves in this position but it can just add easily get others who are similarly primed to believe anything they're told bc of isolation, like elderly relatives who get all their info from facebook because they're retired and have no physical community

yeah

it's so unbelievably bleak in ways i had not previously thought possible. the world is worse than i had the capacity to imagine.

thank you for that, this is all. a lot