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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who goes to an LLM for spiritual enlightenment and self-understanding, should first read about the Forer/Barnum effect. Yes that means you too.

The Forer/Barnum effect is why horoscopes, myers-briggs, enneagrams, fortune tellers, and similar parlor tricks work. You tell a person you’ll perform a deep assessment of their psychology, listen intently, then say a bunch of generic statements and their ego will fill in the blanks so it feels like you shared deep meaningful insights that truly understood the person.

This effect works even if you know about it. But once you know, you can catch yourself after that first wow impression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

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Another trick Spiritual Gurus use is to use highly abstract words like "forms", "forms affecting other forms", casting a very wide fishing net.

This allows listeners to get trapped and feel understood by the Guru.

Lol this reminded me of the documentary now episode Batsh*t Valley which parodied the Rajneesh movement. The part where Owen Wilson is making the cult induction tapes with the FBI agents and just saying random mystical crap.

Magicians use this effect I believe:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(magic)

They basically project a choice onto you.

Example: https://youtube.com/shorts/fcHxM47JRjc

Jordan doesn’t know he wasn’t really given a choice, but manipulated.

> Magicians use this effect I believe: They basically project a choice onto you.

Also great for kids. Bad: “It’s chilly. Do you want to wear a sweater?” Good: “It’s chilly. Do you want the blue or green sweater?”

But I think that’s different than the Forer/Barnum effect. That’s just choice curation.

No, a force has nothing to do with a psychological thing, it is always an actual trick or slight of hand.

A magician's choice (Wikipedia it) is closer to what you describe.

(Note that most of David Blaine's videos are edited to cut the part where the actual force happens, which is why it feels like a psychological trick instead of slight of hands)

The simplest example would be a magician presenting two things and saying 'pick one', at which point they say 'okay, I'll keep that one' or 'okay, I'll get rid of that one' depending on the choice. There's a psychological aspect, but only so far as the magician is pretending that the choice actually did anything.

This one's a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vzuDkjtDOY

> The Forer/Barnum effect is why horoscopes, myers-briggs, enneagrams, fortune tellers, and similar parlor tricks work.

I'd argue it's also true of actual therapy.

It's not like therapists can see through your skull and interpret patterns in your brain. They mostly listen intently, and ask some pointed questions, and make you fill in the blanks yourself, too.

Which is to say:

1) I'm not sure if seeking immunity from this effect to full extent possible is a good idea;

2) It makes no sense to round ChatGPT off with the horoscopes and quacks, if the difference between that group and genuine therapy or spiritual help is a matter of tiny details, not of kind.

The difference is that a therapist works with you for years, takes notes, and builds an actual working model of your psyche. They may start with generics but build towards an actual understanding. A lot like an engineer building a domain model of the business they’re working in.

A horoscope or personality test can’t do that because they’re not even personalized. They explicitly have to fit the thousands of people reading that same text.

ChatGPT (or any LLM) might eventually be able to do this. But from what I’ve seen it isn’t there yet.

> The difference is that a therapist works with you for years, takes notes, and builds an actual working model of your psyche. They may start with generics but build towards an actual understanding. A lot like an engineer building a domain model of the business they’re working in.

Ideally, yes. I wonder how that compares to actual, lived experience of people. Because as far as I can tell, it's hard to afford getting to that point these days even on a tech salary.

In my own lived experience, even half a year of therapy didn't go anywhere further I could get with ChatGPT or Claude over one or two frustrated evenings.

(But then maybe it's just me who was spectacularly bad at finding and retaining therapists.)

> Barnum effect

As in P. T. Barnum of circus fame.

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