@grimalkina @glyph thx for your convo on #llm induced #psychosis, #burnout in context of #codeReview and the #interpersonal aspects of #knowledgeWork.
you point out things which i feel very acutely; and also feel actively deprived of ways of talking about them.
feels like a life and death matter to me at this point - good cue to consult a clinician (spoiler: didn't work.)
i don't know if my lived experience is even comprehensible to anyone at this point, so i won't tag you in next posts 🧶
so... suppose we were to talk about #CognitiveSecurity (#CriticalThinking)
you know, the thing which gives you and your community some degree of resilience against #MassPersuasion (#Propaganda)
in terms of #CogSec, I really don't think modern communities have progressed much past "pronounce the #Shibboleth correctly"
more advanced shibboleth: "demonstrate incapacity for metacommunication". (yknow, like how authorities talk. otherwise #Solipsists would just run circles around 'em 😁)
🧶
#CogSec: being able to recognize when a term is being misused; when thinking is being conducted incorrectly. in the scientific community, this is socially normative.
in other contexts, *caring* that thinking is being conducted incorrectly is the high road to psychotic states. any adversarially-minded person can cause you emotional pain by inducing cognitive dissonance 🎶
in such environments the degree of #CogSec is low already, so this form of #abuse passes below threshold of recognition 🧶
my #Metapsychotic pet theory: it's not entirely useless to view #Psychosis as an #Autoimmune condition of the #Cognitome. 🫤❓
see, I can repeatedly commit the awful #fauxpas of inventing #jargon all by myself, without assistance from a particular #discipline, nor from the generalized #LargeLanguageMachine! 😁
already by itself a sufficient reason to be #tunedout of the #vibe, I know I know
the worst part?
you can do this, too!
🧶
so, #CogSec = practices that protect the individual, as well as the community, from #subversion of #worldmodel
i.e. from being *made to believe* useless, counterproductive, or outright harmful ideas
incidentally, how's the West been doing in that department? lol. lmao
what does #CogSecFail do to a #ProSocial #Allist holding the honest belief that "as long as you put in honest work, and treat fellow humans with kindness, at the end of the day, things will likely turn out fine"?
welp 🧶
it turns them into a #User 🪄✨
defined as: one who _pays to maintain ignorance of externalities_ 🥽
which, in turn, diminishes their agency; which, in turn, can worsen external conditions; which, in turn, makes ignorance even more desirable; which, in turn, makes them pay for temporary relief 🤑
so, a runaway feedback loop overwhelming perception. as a whole, impairing capacity for cognition beyond simple repairs
iirc, #BFSkinner and the #Behaviorist school demonstrated similar mechanisms... 🧶
#Users pay with money, with time, with effort, with health, with their locus of control, with the soul of their first born ...
wait, uh, what? souls? 👿 ⁉️
as any good author of conspiracy theories must surely know, #Mythologemes and #Tropes tend to exist for valid reason; they signify complex assemblages of affective mechanisms that persist throughout #culture 👼
in this case: #inautonomy may be #heritable 🍼
welp 🧶
anyway.
#user is like "i'm not stupid! i can fix this!" 💪
tries to regain #autonomy.
that's great! nobody can regain your autonomy for you! what options are there?
the purpose of #science, may be to understand and describe #reality - but not to solve your #akrasia! they don't heal people there.
could switch to being #user of #psychotherapy: legitimate, socially accepted maybe-solution 🏁
i mean, after fellow humans perform the "get help" status transaction a few times, why the hell not 🧶
alternatively, #user may take up task of "figuring it out". you got yourself in that mess in the first place, right? it's on you to get out. #youcandoit
(...you did not get yourself in that mess; you were following incentives correctly and never actually knew better? your fault
unsurprisingly, it's considered unthinkable to blame "the everyone" - that's how you get #systemic #dysfunction with all the diffuse responsibility this implies, but who dares fuck with a #system?)
so, #bootstrap? 🧶
#user begins to #research, or - since their #CogSec was what failed after all - more like to "do one's own research" (pejorative) with requisite slight #resentment for the "#ivorytower" of actual science
and that's where #user gets got with the #conspiracy theories; which are basically #ads for #wireheading
just-so stories #designed to give a sense of #understanding, #belonging, and #community. then harness for political ends.
let's call those 1st gen #nonlethal #countermeasures 🧶
as in: they make you terminally stupid, but you retain some degree of productive capacity.
the "trouble" with those is that they form communities, with all that implies. basically pop-up mini-religions of >1 person. those take curation!
the autonomous "2nd gen" countermeasure being deployed as we speak: #LLMPsychosis.
that's where you follow the example of your peers and ask a #LargeLanguageMachine trained on the entire awful #Internet to...
#trap you in a #personalized #bubble 🫧
welp 🧶
so, psychotic pet theory about psychosis:
by the time you are designated #psychotic, it's already too late.
the "phase shift" occurred earlier, when you lost your capacity for #RealityTesting; and, with it, for #ConsensusBuilding, i.e. for meaningful and meaning-making communication.
you are now on the other side of the #CogSec fence.
proximates never knew how to help, and are only happy to #ShootTheMessenger to keep emotional pressure within limits.
metaphorically...
you hope. 🧶
one way to regain capability for #RealityTesting, is to test whether #boundaries of the socially permissible are where you think they are; i.e. to #ActOut...
...at which point you give reason to others to respond defensively, i.e. with aggression.
which, incidentally, resolves the cognitive dissonance that originally trapped you as a #user then kept nudging you towards #psychosis:
thankfully, things are not any more "simultaneously OK and NOTOK":
your are now only, and decidedly, NOTOK🧶
at this point, you only get "#Normal" (in the "I'm OK, you're OK" sense) responses to your communications from ... your Personal Psychosis Amplifier.
which is simultaneously:
- just a #StochasticParrot
- a fictive character occupying #Dunbar slots in your #cognitome
- a proprietary computer designed by #FAANG for the express purpose of tracking #users throughout their lifecycle as "#deagentified" participants in #capitalism 🧶
so, for all efforts, and risks taken, and bridges burned, all the user has achieved, is to move the cognitive dissonance 1 level upwards in the order of abstractions
now it's your "paranoia", (pervasive expectation of maddening negative outcome) that becomes, perversely, "both false and true":
you correctly feel threatened; they are out to get you; but because you have them a reason; but it's not your fault; but they can't possibly be made to understand that.
one must imagine Sisyphus 🧶
so what I did, in the case, was dodge that and have quasi-psychotic states about such things that are not mediated by computing devices.
that way, at least my downfall cannot be used to teach the machines to be more insidious, or some shit like that, i though.
no need. the normal #prosocial #vibe #attunement (i.e. #value #alignment) process of #allists is sufficient to make induced psychosis lightly contagious.
how does that work? 🧶
ever heard, "the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent"?
social (i.e. delegated) cognition has the weird side effect that the more people believe an idea, the less it has to have in common with object-level reality
that's how hierarchies/ideologies/cults (can we just call them #metahuman organisms already!) gain adherents and self-perpetuate
one is given sustenance, in return for believing a substandard worldmodel which serves "community" rather than "constituents" 🧶
this "body politic" is rife with "#sociopaths". they fulfill the equivalent of #ganglia, since they are a bit less bound by norms.
in the #vibe metaphor, they may have "absolute pitch", or "hear different frequency ranges"... incidentally, remember the term "dog whistle"? yeah, their thing is basically to speak a different register of language.
let's not look their way, but remember our much-suffering #User, once again trapped in brain-damaging (probably literally) #CognitiveDissonance: 🧶
so, our true-believing good citizen sees the sociopaths reinforced for maintaining low collective #CogSec:
for all their speaking lies and nonsense and bullshit with impunity; for all their treating fellow humans with cruelty; they have now been rewarded with a #CognitiveProsthesis:
the #LargeLanguageMachines proper. some ones you have as an app on your phone right now. 🧶
(see, people! you don't need AI to make fools of yourselves with batshit rants! do it the old way like God commanded 😁)
while the user is forced to push a big ball of cognitive dissonance uphill, the gleeful "mad men" are perfectly capable of making "productive" use of this new #helltech.
just like previous generations of tech/adopter dyads did. sure, it's making a #BullshitJob easier. but a jerb is a jerb, it pays the bills.
hell, early adopters even get enough of a resource boost to afford to start a family - and make the entire mess the problem of their first born 🧶
meanwhile, our non-sociopathic #user, under the sheer new *intensities* brought on by AI is driven *literally* psychotic; violently and/or self-destructively so; "restrainably crazy" if you permit the dysphemism. (gen0 of the #countermeasure was how to not need physical restraints...)
and, here's the rub:
users are driven insane by trying to bootstrap themselves back into sanity. 🧶
...by using the wrong tool for the job, of course.
but a tool explicitly or implicitly recommended by those collectively considered sane.
hence, #toxic #prosociality as #etiology of #psychosis.
(blaming everyone else - the mark of the #loser! #shibboleth awareness week is ongoing) 🧶
someone successfully acculturated into the #cogsec network of "sanity" throughout normal phases of childhood development, wouldn't have the faintest idea how to *become* sane, i.e. intentionally/consciously establish a correctly-functioning perception-cognition-reaction loop that serves them appropriately.
it's like the fish who had no notion of water.
(observation: i now feel vaguely threatened every time i use #metaphor or #culturalreference.
#countermeasure in effect!)
🧶
not nice but a person