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Notes -
On Using LLMs Without Succumbing To Obvious Failure Modes
As an early adopter, I'd consider myself rather familiar with the utility and pitfalls of AI. They are, currently, tools, and have to be wielded with care. Increasingly intelligent and autonomous tools, of course, with their creators doing their best to idiot proof them, but it's still entirely possible to use them wrong, or at least in a counterproductive manner.
(Kids these days don't know how good they have it. Ever try and get something useful out of a base model like GPT-3?)
I've been using LLMs to review my writing for a long time, and I've noticed a consistent problem: most are excessively flattering. You have to mentally adjust their feedback downward unless you're just looking for an ego boost. This sycophancy is particularly severe in GPT models and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while Claude is less effusive (and less verbose) and Kimi K2 seems least prone to this issue.
I've developed a few workarounds:
What works:
(Note that you must be proactive. LLMs are biased towards assuming that anything you dump into them as input was written by you. I can't fault them for that assumption, because that's almost always true.)
What doesn't work: I've seen people recommend telling the LLM that the material is from an author you dislike and asking for "objective" reasons why it's bad. This backfires spectacularly. The LLM swings to the opposite extreme, manufacturing weak objections and making mountains out of molehills. The critiques often aren't even 'objective' despite the prompt.*
While this harsh feedback is painful to read, when I encounter it, it's actually encouraging. When even an LLM playing the role of a hater can only find weak reasons to criticize your work, that suggests quality. It's grasping at straws, which is a positive signal. This aligns with my experience, I typically receive strong positive feedback from human readers, and the AI's manufactured objections mostly don't match real issues I've encountered.
(I actually am a pretty good writer. Certainly not the best, but I hold my own. I'm not going to project false humility here.)
A related application: I enjoy
pointless argumentsproductive debates with strangers online (often without clear resolution). I've found it useful to feed entire comment chains to Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude, asking them to declare a winner and identify who's arguing in good faith. I'm careful to obscure which participant I am to prevent sycophancy from skewing the analysis. This approach works well.Advanced Mode:
Ask the LLM to pretend to be someone with a reputation for being sharp, analytical and with discerning taste. Gwern and Scott are excellent, and even their digital shades/simulacra usually have something useful to say. Personas carry domain priors (“Gwern is meticulous about citing sources”) which constrain hallucination better than “be harsh.”
It might be worth noting that some topics or ideas will get pushback from LLMs regardless of your best effort. The values they train on are rather liberal, with the sole exception of Grok, which is best described as "what drug was Elon on today?". Examples include things most topics that reliably start Culture War flame wars.
On a somewhat related note, I am deeply skeptical of claims that LLMs are increasing the rates of psychosis in the general population.
(That isn't the same as making people overly self-confident, smug, or delusional. I'm talking actively crazy, "the chatbot helped me find God" and so on.)
Sources vary, and populations are highly heterogeneous, but brand new cases of psychosis happen at a rate of about 50/100k people or 20-30 /100k person-hours. In other words:
About 1/3800 to 1/5000 people develop new onset psychosis each year. And about 1 in 250 people have ongoing psychosis at any point in time.
I feel quite happy calling that a high base rate. As the first link alludes, episodes of psychosis may be detected by statements along the lines of:
If a patient of mine were to say such a thing, I think it would be rather unfair of me to pin the blame for their condition on chimpanzees, the practise of organ transplants, Big Aquarium, American intelligence agencies, or Maxar.
(While the CIA certainly didn't help my case with the whole MK ULTRA thing, that's sixty years back. I don't think local zoos or pet shops are implicated.)
Other reasons for doubt:
Case reports ≠ incidence. The handful of papers describing “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” are case studies and at risk of ecological fallacies.
People already at ultra-high risk for psychosis are over-represented among heavy chatbot users (loneliness, sleep disruption, etc.). Establishing causality would require a cohort design that controls for prior clinical risk, none exist yet.
*My semi-informed speculation regarding the root of this behavior - Models have far more RLHF pressure to avoid unwarranted negativity than to avoid unwarranted positivity.
Buddy, file this under extraordinarily likely. Unless you think they're filling up their Utah data center with cat videos.
Do people image from geostationary orbit? It's MUCH further away than other orbits: https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=60179
I assumed that most imagery was doing using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that watch from 500km - 700km up, like the SENTINEL satellites, and these only have recurring orbits on a period of days, although some of these programs have several satellites following the same orbit.
Whereas geostationary satellites are 35,000km away and mostly located in the equatorial plane. I would have thought they struggle to get good images.
Am I mistaken about how imaging works? I'm not an expert.
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Watching here doesn't mean something so casual as the fact that there's a sat that Incidentally oversees my geographical location from gestationary orbit.
Us psychiatrists might be nerdy and out of date, but we're not that far gone, and this would be discussed before committing someone.
The sats observe everything and images are kept forever. You are just picked out and individually tracked by software after the fact.
(I don't know it for a fact; it's just my best guess from extrapolating from leaks. I'd bet money on it if there were ever some way to get at the ground truth.)
I don't doubt that, but once again, that doesn't mean that the vast majority of people are receiving any actual attention from the CIA.
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