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You mean the Harvard MBA right? He means the Harvard MBA?

When challenged by the dictum that people often confuse nature with history, the response is to abandon arguments from human nature and replace them with a fantasy caveman land.

Caveman land implies human nature without needing to make an argument for it. It is so far in the past that there is limited evidence, and most people you encounter aren't anthropologists. So you can justify all your unexamined assumptions about present society with an appeal to the caveman land.

Ironically, all you need to craft a fantasy caveman land is an imagination. "Picture hunter gatherers, sitting around a campfire, carving rocks into Pokemon cards and trading them." What a great story! Anything is possible in caveman land.

But what if the only real way to break through avoidance patterns is to stop avoiding? What if the tradeoffs of LLMs are instant gratification and further atrophying of your executive functions?

I have gained a paranoid suspicion that our capacity to decrease immediate distress with technology has become so great that we are creating a world where people with certain temperaments can have their personalities become more and more extreme through the assistance of technologies which, for example, decrease the amount of interpersonal interaction required or prevent the need for deep focus.

> (Myself, I'm in a strange position with doppelgängers, because I simultaneously want real human connection and keep getting disappointed with many of the real humans).

I don't think you're in a strange position at all. You are just being honest about what is the undercurrent of much of modern technological development. AI is simple the apex of a trend to replace human interaction with a simulacrum, which without your awareness, reduces your own tolerance for the frustrations of real human interaction, thus making you more dependent on the simulacrum.

Who put on a fake folksy affect, so he clearly can't have been an elitist.

They've been rendered neurotic, or their neurotic tendencies have become dominant through habituation, or they have developed anti-social behaviors in response to a combination of temperament and a society that is unable to promote pro-sociality.

I have friends and family, but staring at a computer 8 hours or more a day is corrosive to my mental health.

And when I am in an office, I do interact with people, in meaningless and meaningful ways, whether I am forced to or not.

I know this does not apply to everybody, but I function best with constant low level social interaction. I should have picked a different career, but I didn't have that foresight.

Kafka would find your attempt to explain his story with AI hilarious.

I guess I appreciate the explicit realpolitik of it all, but I'm not sure I buy your argument. The US is the world's current dominant global empire, and unlike other leftists, I don't believe this is inherently a bad thing. But I don't think it's necessarily a good thing either. It's just the reality.

I also think your whole unipolar vs. multipolar framework is ahistorical. It's always been more secure living within the cosmopolitan center of an empire, but there's never just been one empire.

I just think your view of history is too simplistic to be accurate or interesting. If/when the US declined as a global power, the results would be entirely unpredictable. They wouldn't adhere to the kind of formula you're describing.

You are right that there are a large number of top AI people who are very concerned with the ramifications of AI. I would say there are two core issues.

The first is that these people have often been indistinguishable from the ambitious and power hungry people I was decrying. Sam Altman was able to blend in for a long time by copying the rhetoric of AI safety types. When there is this much money to be made and power to be amassed, it's not hard to pretend to care.

The second is that I have often been disappointed by what the AI safety folks are concerned about. There has been a huge amount of talk about existential risk and not nearly as much about, say, the impact on children if education is outsourced to AI. The obsession with science fiction led to some very out there scenarios that may or may not still happen, but have nothing to do with the very real impacts of AI on people's lives right now. I believe that even the well intentioned have been too detached from humanity as a whole.

This is what happens when the people building your society's advanced technology have no theory of mind. Too much science fiction, not enough human interaction.

The Social Network is looking more and more prophetic. When your only ambition is success for its own sake, driven by insecurities you can never name, you're going to make things that don't actually serve other people, or only do as an unfortunate side effect of you making money and gaining power.

A degenerating research programme.

"Consensus science" is science.

You're underestimating how gross it was to me at first.

All over this thread people are saying things like, "this doesn't describe somebody who is anti-social, it describes a narcissist" or "I'm not anti-social, I am asocial." And it makes me think about internet discourse around neurodivergence and human diversity (not the racist dog whistle) more closely.

It seems that the models that dominate are ones which sort people into categories that emphasize positive traits and explain away negative ones as, "Society demands X but I just need Y." This is an important corrective to the medicalized model, but sometimes I feel it obscures the degree to which people are malleable. A lot of our behavior is habitual, and if you change your habits, you can change your "personality" without rewriting your own temperaments.

The other problem is one of causation. A group of people could all describe themselves as asocial, but what drives them to that label is entirely different. One legitimately needs less social interaction, one is riddled with social anxiety and has developed a deeply avoidant response, and one just hates people. They may be unified in feeling out of place in some social interactions, but what they need (or even don't need) is entirely different.

I don't know. I couldn't sleep last night and this is all I could think about. What does that make me?

Then why are you posting here? You must require some kind of social interaction. Is arguing with people on HN meeting your needs, or are the alternatives all too scary and alienating to consider?

In general, I am skeptical when anybody says, "I am a ______." We vastly overstate what aspects of our condition are innate and which are merely habitual. I have seen many people with misanthropic tendencies find balance, and many others sink into the mire.

Oh so you actually are a nihilist in the sense that Nietzsche meant. That's too bad.

All of my Russian friends briefly become terrified when they pass by a mirror, and have to regain their composure.

If you keep drinking them, you'll likely acquire a taste. I didn't used to like any artificial sugar flavors, but now I've grown accustomed to them.

You don't sound much like a nihilist to me.

Well in this case it was made by and for Japanese speakers.

You say that now, but once we perfect AMBAC technology and accidentally release large numbers of Minovsky particles, we will need humanoid combat vehicles to fight our battles!

One common personality disorder I see is being extremely defensive when encountering any discussion of human psychology. This comes from a deep psychological fragility.

Classic OAD (Obvious Asshole Disorder)

Or that even the people who believe they are making meaningful text on the internet, because of the constraints of the medium, are simply socializing in a different way.

Service guarantees citizenship!

Is there an equivalent to Betteridge's law of headlines that applies in situations like this?

When the title of an article is "Don't do this" the comments are entirely people doing that.

This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.

A statement that can be reversed onto the speaker without effort is meaningless. It has no content. It just means, "I am rational and you are not." Ok, then.

You missed my point. The author argued that gameplay loops are a holdover from quarter munching arcade machines. I used Rogue as proof that this is at best an incomplete account. I simply mentioned Pac-Man as the beginning of the arcade boom, which happened to come out the same year as Rogue, a computer game with a much more addicting gameplay loop (in my opinion).

The fact that this article does not mention the word "roguelike" once is quite telling. The argument that gameplay loops are a relic of arcades falls flat when you realize that Rogue came out in 1980, the same year as Pac-man. The entire argument falls flat when you realize that a gameplay loop is simply another way of explaining the means of interactivity, and interactivity is core to the idea of video games. Even the shortest narrative game has a "loop" of some kind.

Honestly, when I read essays like this I always have to ask: have games changed, or have you? I had what felt like infinite time as a kid to devote to gaming, and as I've aged, my relationship to video games has changed substantially. I can relate to wanting more bite sized experiences, but then again, a single run of a roguelike, the ultimate "gameplay loop" can feel just as satisfying as a short narrative game.

There are plenty of valid complaints to lodge against modern game design, but I think the author's framing is flawed.