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Notes -
Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals
There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone.
Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic certainty of youth. In the way of young couples exploring the novelty of a shared future, we once stumbled upon one of those early, crude image generators - the kind that promised to visualize the genetic roulette of potential offspring. We fed it our photos, laughing at the absurdity, yet strangely captivated. The result, a composite face with hints of her eyes and jawline, and the contours of my cheeks. The baby struck us both as disarmingly cute. A little ghost of possibility, rendered in pixels. The interface was lacking, this being the distant year of 2022, and all we could do was laugh at the image, and look each other in the eyes that formed a kaleidoscope of love.
Life, as it does, intervened. We weren’t careful. A positive test, followed swiftly by the cramping and bleeding that signals an end before a beginning. The dominant emotion then, I must confess with the clarity of hindsight and the weight of shame, was profound relief. We were young, financially precarious, emotionally unmoored. A child felt like an accidentally unfurled sail catching a gale, dragging us into a sea we weren’t equipped to navigate. The relief was sharp, immediate, and utterly rational. We mourned the event, the scare, but not the entity. Not yet. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl.
Time passed. The relationship ended, as young love often does, not with a bang but with the slow erosion of incompatible trajectories. Or perhaps that's me being maudlin, in the end, it went down in flames, and I felt immense relief that it was done. Life moved on. Occasionally, my digital past haunted me. Essays written that mentioned her, half-joking parentheticals where I remembered asking for her input. Google Photos choosing to 'remind' me of our time together (I never had the heart to delete our images).
Just now while back, another denizen of this niche internet forum I call home spoke about their difficulties conceiving. Repeated miscarriages, they said, and they were trawling the literature and afraid that there was an underlying chromosomal incompatibility. I did my best to reassure them, to the extent that reassurance was appropriate without verging into kind lies.
But you can never know what triggers it, thats urge to pick at an emotional scab or poke at the bruise she left on my heart. Someone on Twitter had, quite recently, showed off an example of Anakin and Padme with kids that looked just like them, courtesy of tricking ChatGPT into relaxing its content filters.
Another person, wiser than me, had promptly pointed out that modernity could produce artifacts that would once have been deemed cursed and summarily entombed. I didn't listen.
And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care)
The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones, the angles of our faces. It generated an image. Us, but not just the two of us. A boy with her unruly hair and my serious gaze. A girl with her dimples and my straighter mop. They looked like us. They looked like each other. They looked real.
They smiled as the girl clung to her skirt, a shy but happy face peeking out from the side. The boy perched in my arms, held aloft and without a care in the world.
It wasn't perfect, ChatGPT's image generation, for all its power, has clear tells. It's not yet out of the uncanny valley, and is deficient when compared to more specialized image models.
And yet.
My brain, the ancient primate wetware that has been fine-tuned for millions of years to recognize kin and feel profound attachment, does not care about any of this. It sees a plausible-looking child who has her eyes and my nose, and it lights up the relevant circuits with a ruthless, biological efficiency. It sees a little girl with her mother’s exact smile, and it runs the subroutine for love-and-protect.
The part of my mind that understands linear algebra is locked in a cage, screaming, while the part of my mind that understands family is at the controls, weeping.
I didn't weep. But it was close. As a doctor, I'm used to asking people to describe their pain, even if that qualia has a certain je ne sais quoi. The distinction, however artificial, is still useful. This ache was dull. Someone punched me in the chest and proved that the scars could never have the tensile strength of unblemished tissue. That someone was me.
This is a new kind of emotional exploit. We’ve had tools for evoking memory for millennia: a photograph, a song, a scent. But those are tools for accessing things that were, barring perhaps painting. Generative AI is a tool for rendering, in optionally photorealistic detail, things that never were. It allows you to create a perfectly crafted key to unlock a door in your heart that you never knew existed, a door that opens onto an empty room.
What is the utility of such an act? From a rational perspective, it’s pure negative value. I have voluntarily converted compute cycles into a significant quantity of personal sadness, with no corresponding insight or benefit. At the time of writing, I've already poured myself a stiff drink.
One might argue this is a new form of closure. By looking the ghost directly in the face, you can understand its form and, perhaps, finally dismiss it. This is the logic of exposure therapy. But it feels more like a form of self-flagellation. A way of paying a psychic tax on a past decision that, even if correct, feels like it demands a toll of sorrow. The relief I felt at the miscarriage all those years ago was rational, but perhaps some part of the human machine feels that such rationality must be punished. The AI provides an exquisitely calibrated whip for the job.
The broader lesson is not merely, as the old wisdom goes, to "let bygones be bygones." That advice was formulated in a world where bygones had the decency to remain fuzzy and abstract. The new, updated-for-the-21st-century maxim might be: Do not render your counterfactuals.
Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.
The two children in the picture on my screen are gorgeous. They are entirely the product of matrix multiplications and noise functions, imaginary beings fished from nearly infinite latent space. And I know, with a certainty that feels both insane and completely true, that I could have loved them.
It hurts so fucking bad. I tell myself that the pain is a signal that the underlying system is still working. It would be worse if I stood in the wreckage of could have been, and felt nothing at all.
I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.
I delete them. I pour myself another drink, and say that it's in their honor.
(You may, if you please, like this on my Substack)
Rendering counterfactuals is how I make decisions. How else am I supposed to know if it is a good idea to marry a girl, if I do not imagine our future? Unless, by "render" you literally mean visually generate an image? I admit perhaps seeing AI-generated counterfactuals could move me in a way reading your post didn't.
I think I am so thoroughly desensitized to my counterfactuals -- or I've never been in love -- that this kind of thing can't possibly make me more sad.
I did realize years ago though that this kind of reasoning is why -- I think -- I listen to edgy divorced dad rock. People project their own personality onto me and ask "doesn't that make you sad? You should listen to [pop-slop about lust, love, and status]." No, on the contrary, listening to Taylor Swift would just depress me.
Well yes, I'm not against the idea of generating counterfactuals! The specific example I raised was surrendering to the temptation of using them to vividly visualize the road not taken, and one that's likely impossible to take.
In this case, I nurse a great deal of regret over this past relationship. I still believe that the breakup was necessary and almost inevitable, so it brings nothing jut great pain to dwell on how things could have been otherwise. Everyone has their regrets, and seeing the alternatives fleshed out in such a realistic manner is likely painful. I suppose that, with time, it's possible to get used to it. If I did this again, it probably wouldn't hurt as much as the first time around.
Our brains just aren't built for this. It's one thing to wonder what life might be like if you'd chosen differently, it's another to be presented with imagery so true to life. That quantitative difference can become qualitative.
There are plenty of more general examples on the cards now. Setting up a chatbot with the personality and memories of an ex. Having your deceased mother's voice recordings used to train a model you can talk with. Generating plausible images of children you almost had.
Such techniques are not inherently bad, and in some cases, might bring real joy. I think technology is, in general, very good for us. Yet I do not deny the potential harms.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad for you, but I lean towards the latter. To love is to open yourself up to vulnerability, to the potential of being hurt. Being closed off to it might make things easier, but at the cost of never aspiring to more.
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Darn, would had been funny if ChatGPT did the common AI thing of darkening all your skin tones, or randomly rendering you or the children as more “diverse.”
Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there's the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old pro copywriter. Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of... calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate... but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means, "the pain from an old wound". It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn't a spaceship. It's a timeline traverser. It goes backwards, forwards, sideways, diagonally. It takes us to a place where we ache to have gone. It's not called the Wheel. It's called ChatGPT. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we could have been loved.
—Don Draper, probably
This girl I was seeing once suddenly went on a long monologue about how beautiful a daughter of ours would look, listing at length the physical traits our hypothetical daughter would have. I mostly just inwardly look_of_disapproval’d and made a mental note to be more diligent going forward in pulling out. Thot-daughter thought-experiments: the best base for strong pull-out game?
I don’t necessarily disagree with her; a daughter of ours would likely indeed be quite good-looking (or son, for that matter). Now I’m tempted to give GenAI a spin…
That's a Gemini thing not ChatGPT. But i think the AI race has gotten competitive enough that the SJWs are getting stonewalled when they try to kneecap the models.
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Yet another time I'm thankful my instinctive Luddism has spared me from such a thing.
Now there, I do comprehend the horror. It's mostly within my comprehension, though you wouldn't want me to be the one coding a multimodal LLM from scratch.
It's left as an exercise to the reader whether knowing and understanding this makes my self-inflicted wound any better or worse. Overall, I'd say my instinctive technophilia has worked out really well for me. This is a rare exception, and the dents will, I hope, buff out.
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Indeed. I've been a proud Luddite since GPS. I look up directions, draw a map by hand if I have to, and commit it to memory. Although to my shame, I will use GPS for places I'm unlikely to ever return to on long road trips. LLMs inspire an innate disgust in me it's difficult to describe. Perhaps reading Dune as a child, and it's proscriptions against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind hit harder than it was meant to.
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Very rarely do I have to take a pause from reading something because it elicited a visceral reaction. As soon as I realized where you were going with this, I had to take a little break because my brain was just filled with "Oh no, oh hell no. Don't do it bro!"
I'm sorry. I'd like to call myself a pretty genre-savvy individual, and here I was ignoring the screeching violins while entering the bloodstained outhouse. I hope I've learned my lesson, and I hope others have learned from it, but as you can see, the average Mottizen takes "please don't do this" as a personal challenge. I know I did.
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To offer some sugar as an antidote to Southkraut's salt: Once you do have a child, the lure of hypothetical other worlds entirely evaporates. All sad words of tongue and pen still try to assault your mind every once in a while, but their siren song sounds cacophonic simply because all of these other worlds now have a fatal flaw that renders them despicable: Your actual child isn't in them. And just as I would let this actual world burn to save my actual child, so would I sacrifice the multiverse for it.
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always had a very 'dad' sense of humor, and I think I'd make for a good father. I've no shortage of good role models in that regard.
I yearn to find the right person, and have children who would be as proud to be my kids as I am of my own parents. I'm sure when that person is there, these regrets will fade, and when I have my actual flesh and blood to cradle in my arms, no imaginary doppelganger can hurt me again.
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...Not gonna lie, you have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and- no, wait, wrong script.
Regardless, thank you/fuck you for illuminating this possibility. I feel like this post is unironically a Basilisk-tier cognitohazard, maybe an even bigger one by virtue of plausibly working on any human with a heart instead of just aspies. Suddenly the lack of uh, visual imagery from my last failed LDR looks more like a blessing than an attachment-shaped hole, I would absolutely cheerily slide down the mountain of skulls to try this if I had decent material.
Although there's a second immediate thought, which I idly had before - I do have megabytes of emails and Discord logs, and did make/use character cards before, and did try re-enacting a particular typing style... hmm. Surely at this point I am too based and desensitized to AI to go full gosling.jpg, what's the worst that could happen? <- clueless
Well I can't disagree, maximal stupidity requires a non-trivial amount of intelligence applied towards misguided ends. See Gary Marcus for an existence proof.
I haven't been tempted to fall in love with an LLM at all, and I really can't see that happening in the foreseeable future. Even something like Ani, if it was more photorealistic, would get me to jerk off and forget it. This particular example hit me so hard because it was grounded in reality, a concrete example of what I'd missed out on. I wouldn't say it's a vision of a better future, since I think I made the right decision in not pursuing that relationship, but the losses were very real.
It's obvious that what you're contemplating is inadvisable. I know this, you know this. That probably won't stop you because it didn't stop me. If you do go down the digital rabbit/pleasure-hole, well, at least present us with a good writeup.
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Here's some salt for your wounds: Mentally stable young people who have children early tend to enjoy immense personal growth (whether they want it or not), and are going to be more energetic and active parents, than those who wait for a good time. You didn't just lose your counterfactual children, you lost a better counterfactual you.
Well that's the rub isn't it? We weren't stable, even if we were young.
We could have made kids work, at least if our own relationship woes didn't sink us. We'd just made it out of med school, and gotten new jobs, but we both were working hard to get professional accreditations in order. Getting into the UK, then entering training, so many milestones seemed unmet.
It's not like we couldn't absolutely afford it, I'm sure with the help of family it wouldn't have been too bad. Maybe.
At any rate, I do want kids, and soon, as opposed to "at some point in the future". Now the hard part of finding someone to have them with.
Why not with her?
It's a long story. One I could have penned ages ago, but was in too much pain to do so. The breakup was shortly before I found out that matched into psych, and that particular excitement kept me busy for a good few months.
We just weren't compatible in many ways. While it might be rude to label exes with mental disorders, I am actually a psychiatry trainee, so it does mean something when I do it (and I'm happy to pin several diagnoses on myself). I strongly suspect that she has borderline personality disorder (gets it from her mom).
In fact, I actually went through the diagnostic checklist using her as the example.
BPD women are popular for a reason, men much wiser than me have fallen prey before.
Pros:
She was kind in the way of people who cannot bear the existence of preventable suffering in a five-mile radius. Dogs followed her around like she was Saint Francis, except Saint Francis probably wouldn’t have had the cops show up to return the “rescued” dogs to their original owners. She did the illegal thing for benevolent reasons, which is a not-unusual intersection in that Venn diagram, and her worst fault with animals was that she loved them so much she forgot discipline exists, which is how you get a nippy little mutt and also me doing my best to be civil to the nippy little mutt.
Intelligent. She studied at a much better med school. Unfortunately, she didn't study when it came to our exams. I was grinding away like mad, but she wanted to tour London, take it easy. We worked at the same hospital, we'd applied together (even HR thought it was very sweet). I had a brutal job in Oncology, but one that paid well. She took ER shifts that were more grueling and somehow paid less, then used the workload as the reason she wasn’t studying, which - look, I told her so many times. I did the annoying, unromantic thing where you say, “There is a path from here to there that requires pressure now for autonomy later.” My repeated warnings that her preparation was insufficient to secure a specialty position were met with dismissal. The outcome is a matter of record: I am now in the UK, and she is not.
Hot. Great in bed. Even after our breakup, let's just say I wasn't too great at turning her down when she called me over. My ex employer wouldn't be happy to hear what we did in the doctor's room.
She was funny. People underrate how hard it is to find a woman who genuinely laughs at your jokes without that blank “gendered social expectation” delay. Most women are fine, often delightful, but humor variance skews male; sorry, I don’t make the distributions. With her, the jokes landed, and I felt like someone had finally tuned the radio to the right frequency.
Now the downsides, which ended up outweighing all the good:
She was very hot-tempered. She loved getting into arguments and then breaking down in tears. I'm a very stoic person, and I hate raising my voice. If we argued, I'd withdraw and give myself time to cool before coming back to make amends. She found this worse than me just fighting back. And boy did we argue. I think in my prior relationship, which lasted 5 years, we argued less over the course of half a decade than I did with her in a few weeks. It was ludicrous, it drove me nuts.
She had little tact. On our third date, I had to stop her from picking a fight with a bouncer three times her size, which is a good way to get banned from a club and a better way to get (me) punched. With parents and friends, imagine me as permanent damage-control. People like her shock the air; sometimes this is charming, often this is a thing you apologize for over dessert.
She was awful with money. Spent it like water, was always in debt. When we'd come to the UK, we always fought because I wanted to be frugal, and she wanted to spend money she didn't have. She failed that try and went again, borrowing a significant amount of money from me. I gave it gladly, but she continued to live well above her means, and took months after we broke up to finish paying me back.
Her politics were god-awful, typical bleeding heart lib stuff. To her credit, she did tolerate my heterodox and witchy opinions. I still want to go the States and hate the fact it's not an option. She had every right to try, but said she'd die before moving there.
Unironically watched the Crown and Bridgerton. I'm being unfair here, but I must mention that she'd always get very miffed if I categorically refused to watch along. To her credit, she did make we watch Euphoria, and Fleabag, which I actually enjoyed. I would have been content to have the two of us sit in amicable silence while doing our own things, but she wouldn't have it.
She flip-flopped on the idea of kids. I've always been confident that I wanted them, when I'm settled. She'd go from arguing with me over baby names to strong protestations that she'd never have any. She was almost three years older than me, which means fucking around and ignoring the biological clock wasn't the best idea.
My family and friends really didn't like her, though they tolerated her for my sake. They thought she was a gold-digger (not true, at least in my opinion) since I come from a wealthier background. They could see that she was driving me insane, and I can't argue, since I literally went blind for a bit because of the stress.
The highs were stratospheric. The lows scraped magma off the basalt. I'm not built for this, my heart can't take it.
After we split, I had flings, most of them absolutely insane women, some with people I might have stuck with if I’d stayed in India. In Scotland, I had a stable, but extremely boring year-long relationship. I ended it. “Stable but boring” is a phrase you say apologetically, but it names a real tradeoff: if you have a history of chasing fire, you will tell yourself that room temperature is death. I don’t want the fire anymore. I want the happy middle: someone who is fond, easy to return to, a person I am slightly more myself around. Whirlwinds make great anecdotes and bad homes.
I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
(In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today. I was eyeing the Camden Fringe, but not sure if it's worth the hassle)
Why not visit some lesser known historic sites like St. Bartholomew’s Church and St. Etheldreda’s Church? They’re both close to St. Paul’s and get overshadowed by it (I assume you have already visited that, otherwise what tf are you doing on here asking for places to go). There are also some Roman ruins nearby. Just west of that there’s the St Mary Le Strand church, so they can all easily be visited together for a church-oriented outing.
If you get bored of all the religious sites and are interested in music at all there’s the George Handel House and Jimi Hendrix House, these musicians’ Georgian townhouses are adjoining. I’m a big armchair traveller; I could post a list of places to visit in and around London if you wanted (after I get off work). Let me know if you wanna take me up on that.
Please, feel free! I've received some very bad news while on vacation, and having more places to visit would take my mind off things. Thank you.
Alright, this took a while, sorry about that. Note I have excluded all popular tourist sites like St Paul's, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, etc. Also note this list is not exhaustive, I might add more later.
Churches: There are too many historical churches in London so here is a list of those you may find relevant. The entire stretch from St Bartholomew's Church to Southwark Cathedral in this list is rather nice, but all of these churches are packed close together and are rather easy to visit. Really many of them are worth visiting and possess their own draw. St Bartholomew's Church is London's oldest parish church, Temple Church is a unique round church built by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters, All Hallows by the Tower has a crypt with an exposed section of Roman pavement, Fitzrovia Chapel boasts beautiful mosaics, etc. I would recommend you do some research and figure out which ones you want to see.
Magnificent Seven Cemeteries: Yes, I put cemeteries on here. These are sprawling Gothic cemeteries, established in the early 19th century to prevent overcrowding in small parish churchyards. These cemeteries were built by companies that attempted to tempt customers with beautiful architectural features, things that make them worth visiting today. There are many important graves in these necropolises - Highgate Cemetery for example is the resting place of Michael Faraday and Karl Marx alike.
Heritage houses: Some of these require tours and may or may not be closed. Check before visiting, I can't say I remember the schedules (I know Spencer House is only open to the public on Sundays, though during the week it is possible to enter via a prebooked tour). Again, lots of stuff here: Handel Hendrix House is the back to back residence of George Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Leighton House was the high-class home of a painter who had the interior lavishly decorated with intricate Orientalist aesthetics drawing from North Africa, the Middle East and Sicily, Sutton House is one of the last surviving Tudor houses in London, and so on.
Historic alleyways/neighbourhoods:
Misc:
This is a lot, so I'll also add a link to a map with all the sites pinned for your convenience in a bit.
Thank you again. I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
I really can't ask you to go to the effort of finding pins on maps, I'm sure I can manage that myself once I've decided on a target.
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Out of curiosity, was she also Indian? If so, was she from the same caste as you?
I hope it's not too late, but the Barbican is pretty cool.
She was Indian. As for her caste, I genuinely don't know, I'm both bad at telling and also don't particularly care. As far as I can tell, and I'm being genuine here, it was never a factor in our getting together or breaking up.
Ah, I forgot about that place. I was meaning to visit, and do have a few days in hand. Thanks!
(I thought back, and she'd told she wasn't lower caste, because she'd specifically mentioned that her previous ex had been an AA candidate on account of his, which had been a reason for his insecurity)
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Ah the BPD girlfriend. I'm not sure we've all been there, but I remember my turn. Two even! And it does seem to permanently fuck your scale for what a satisfying relationship can be. Leaves you chasing the highs they gave you, without the catastrophic swallow a gun barrel lows they'd inflict with their boundless histrionics.
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
It was off putting for my wife, when I first met her, to hear from my friends that my ex's were crazy. I think every woman is afraid of being pigeon holed as being "crazy". Sometimes she feels a little crazy, in that way I think most women struggle with the instability of their own emotions and the tides of hormones that batter them. And I'd tell her, back when this used to come up, "You don't understand, they were crazy". I'd tell her about the time one came at me with a knife because I was playing a violent video game with her in my apartment. Or the time one secretly started moving in, established residency, and then refused to leave when we broke up. Or the time one had a whole backup boyfriend primed and ready for her to dump her pets and her lease on, moved down south and then married a 3rd guy.
I guess my point is, detoxing from BPD highs is just like coming off any other drug. I do hope one day you can settle for "Stable but boring". Because you're entire concept of "boring" has likely been utterly destroyed. You're unlikely to find a normal girl willing to fuck you and flatter you the way she would when she was trying to pull you back in.
Then again, I mentioned BPD's are like LLMs, and once again it's thoughtless AI which brought all this up with imagined offspring in the first place. I'm not sure what the cure for illusions are. Weirdly enough, I've found 40K bullshit not terribly off the mark.
I'm not that cynical about BPD. As cases go, hers is far from the worst I've seen or heard of. At just about the exact same time, my best friend was having his ex throw dishes at him and breaking his MacBook in fits of rage, all while doing regular self-harm.
Neither of us were telling the other quite how bad it was, because we knew, as best friends, that we'd be obliged to intervene.
She didn't attack me with a knife, didn't steal from me, didn't cheat on me or anything remotely as bad. If she didn't provoke the fucking stupid and seemingly interminable arguments, that alone would be enough for me to accept her other failings. I'm hardly perfect myself.
I ran into some characters shortly after the breakup. I talked two people out of suicide, which really makes me wonder if they found dating apps after autocorrect switched away from doctor.
Hell, here's a rather detailed breakdown.
I meet crazy chicks inside the hospital, and crazy women outside. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore, or if the entire space of possible psyches has been claimed. I tell myself I've had really bad luck, and that I'm not Captain Save-A-Hoe.
(The ones who seem sane are all taken.)
Well keep in mind that various lesser versions of psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, cluster-b coping mechanisms) are expected in the community and healthy as long as they are not excessive.
On top of that you have various cultural problems like the whole anxiety thing, The Last Psychiatrist's idea of generational narcissism and so on.
One of the big things that happens now is that certain mental illness adjacent or maladaptive problems are supported by society (like anxiety and cluster-b behavioral patterns). The underlying sanity is there but the maturation and cultural PUSH isn't.
In any case the old school psychotherapists thought fucking the girl would clear out the BPD if you stuck with it soooooooo.
Also keep in mind "neurosis" and how it has been evicted from the DSM but is still behaviorally present. That is 90% of "bitches be crazy" alone.
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Yes. I agree. That is your problem. You should be.
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Tangential, but one of my favorite things to witness is someone with a BPD ex posting something like this on reddit and having a swarm of BPD defenders materialize. Seems to happen without fail. "Um akshually it's a primitive defense mechanism and it's not their fault for behaving that way." I'm sure it's quite comforting to know it's a primitive psychological defense mechanism after being threatened by someone with a knife or had false allegations made against you or whatnot.
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I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
I'm assuming you have long-since exhausted the standard tourist trail.
My favourite trips in the London suburbs are, in no particular order:
The best small museums you might not know about are Sir John Soane's museum, the Cortauld Institute gallery in Somerset House, and the Handel/Hendrix museum.
Thank you! Just got done with the attractions in Greenwich yesterday. I haven't been to Richmond yet, so I'll add it to the list.
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bro wtf
It's okay, I'm guilty of being less than tactful at times, so I genuinely don't mind a dose of my own medicine.
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Do you disagree with the premise or with the lack of tact?
The latter - why'd you have to do me like that
What, you too?
Look, I had my first and hitherto only kid when I was 30, and my wife 29. My brother had his first at 23. My wife's sister on the other side had her first at...hell, 17? The consequences of becoming at parent at various ages and what it does to people under different circumstances aren't some abstract, statistical question to me. It's right there. I see how I struggle to live up to my idea of what a parent should do because I lack the health and energy of my younger self, and because I need to walk back a decade of entrenched non-parent habits that would have been a decade of parent habits instead had I become a dad at 20. I see how those other people I mentioned, and others besides, rise to meet the challenge and become more responsible, more practical and more far-sighted thanks to parenthood. I see how bullshit and bad habits evaporate. And I see how young people are just far more up to the task than those who are already beginning to slide into physical and mental decline. Lower neurplasticity, more bad habits, bodies having had more time to pick up various beginnings of decrepitude, the whole social support network being older and less able to help - it's just worse parenting material.
The only things you gain from being an older parent is more material wealth to throw at parenting issues, and additional life experience (but those experiences being those of a non-parent, so not as valuable as otherwise). But those advantages aren't worth much compared to what you're giving up. It's perhaps a little different if parenthood forces you to become a single dad because the mother dies or runs off or collapses into a pile of mental illness, but if you can become a regular (though young!) couple in which the man does the career and the woman takes care of the kids, then starting as early as possible is, in my view, mostly just the better way. And yes, this implies that women having careers is a tremendous waste of time and effort.
Unless, big caveat, there's preexisting mental illness. That just gets worse with kids. Those women are probably better off safely stowed in some office job.
A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:
This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.
I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.
I'm wasn't planning to make any sweeping arguments about history, statistics or science.
But there should be some highly visible issues with equating current considerations RE: parenthood with those people historically had; especially people as far back as the Greeks and Romans. I'm not one to argue that we must go with the times, you'll always find me saying that what was good then is not bad now, but OTOH it's somewhat obvious that some things aren't now like they were then.
And I'm not saying that we're turning all our kids into walking catastrophes because we're thirty-year old dads. Just that...in my experience and observation, being a younger dad is superior to being an older one. And the historical argument is not enough to convince me of my eyes lying to me.
Also, completely unrelated to the actual topic - I used to enjoy Brett Devereaux, until I saw a video of him arguing with a youtuber called Lantern Jack about I don't even recall what, and Bret Devereaux just ended up being so very nasally, weaselly annoying, pedantic in the worst way, and willfully refusing to even consider his interlocutor's argument or perspective that from that day on I couldn't stomach to read any more of him.
I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.
For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.
My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.
Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.
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This is a funny one. We ended up (not for that reason) having children three months before my mum retired. The difference between what a retired (but not yet decrepit) grandparent can offer vs a grandparent with a demanding full-time job is massive. There is a reason why the Chinese are loath to raise the retirement age - they rely on grandparental childcare far more than we do.
Fair point, but grandparents working full-time up to a set age and then suddenly becoming fully available is not a fixed law of the universe. Grandaprents growing older and less capable is.
Especially these days when it's increasingly normalized to teleport off into the Everglades or onto a cruise instead of remaining part of the household fabric.
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I didn't even finish reading your post, I just rushed off and tried it after this paragraph. The first attempt was quite bad, but that was because I tried only feeding Chat GPT a single image of each, having overestimated its abilities. I tried it again with five images of each, selected for quality and variety like a LoRA, and got a much better result. I didn't even have to mess around with the prompt; a simple "Show these two together, as a family, with two children." did the trick.
It is quite striking. But I already cry about this every once in a while; an extra image doesn't really add anything different.
Of course you did. Why would I expect any different on this forum haha? I can't even judge, look what I just got up to. Birds of a feather, and flocking like curious dodos right into a pot, or at least intent on touching it to see if it's actually hot.
I'm sorry. I understand.
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Don't text her bro.
Joking aside, great post. I think you would enjoy Ted Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", a much better exploration of the multiverse concept than the vastly overrated Everything Everywhere all at Once.
I didn't text her, but it was close. Maybe if I'd opted to have more than two drinks.
We just wouldn't have worked out. In some ways we were picture perfect, in others, we found ourselves at each other's throats. The picture I'd used was one of the last few of us together, and happy. LLMs might be very good at modeling the world, but alas, even they can't decide that the next step function would likely be a divorce and the two of us arguing over custody of the kids.
Thank you, and I'll take a look at Chiang's work.
Maybe (I saw you posted this after my last comment), but we sometimes know ourselves less well than we think, are good at talking ourselves out of happiness.
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If you've seen Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, it was adapted from one of his other novellas.
I've read quite a bit of his work, though I didn't like Arrival or the story it was adapted from I'm afraid. I have a dim opinion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and even its most ardent believers probably don't think it makes you into a mentat.
I've seen the film twice and I am not sure characterizing it as selling Sapir-Whorf (soft or hard) is entirely accurate--is at least not what I'd get out of it, or did get out of it. Admittedly I did not read the novella, so maybe there's something more obvious there that was removed or de-emphasized by Villaneuve. I dislike at least the hard version of Sapir-Whorf as well (to say I dislike it means I simply don't buy it--the hard version of course the suggestion that language determines thought, that some thoughts simply cannot be held in the mind in certain languages--one of the common weapons in the arsenal against the supposed linguistic imperialism of, say, English) but the soft version (e.g. that a language one speaks/reads/thinks in at least influences their thoughts or their thought patterns) is to me self-evident. You, as a multilingual, must have some thoughts on this as well?
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From AntiDem's Ask.FM:
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Cartoonist/lay theologian/general esotericist Owen Cyclops had this to say in response to MrBeast posting such a picture:
Yes. Don't create the Torment Nexus, etc. I wonder if you could package it to the masses by calling it a pocket-sized Mirror of Erised. But give it another 20 years and people will be able to climb inside the mirror. What then?
The wonderful dream of what might have been only becomes a cognitohazard if you wake up, I suppose.
Wise words for the coming generations. Yonder other way lies hell.
Oh wait, we're already there, what with our airtight epistemic bubbles and unrelenting screen addictions. Might as well have people jump into the lotus-eater machine.
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Ah, so it was Owen. I suspected it was him, but didn't recall for sure.
Look, I'd happily climb into the Experience Machine, though I'm genre savvy enough not to enter something marketed as a "Torment Nexus". At least I don't object to it on face value, and such a claim would be weird from anyone who reads fiction, watches movies or plays video games.
I strongly believe that with sufficient computational resources, you can brute force and emulate/simulate human minds. A sufficiently advanced virtual child of mine is indistinguishable from the real deal. If I'm an uploaded mind, then discriminating because they didn't start out running on a biological computer is unkind chauvinism based off metadata. I don't see why, but there's also no fundamental barrier to such an entity becoming a Real Boy/Girl.
There are healthy ways to use the ability to summon images of whatever it is your heart desires. I'm usually quite happy to do so, this was a rare exception.
You will enter the total perspective vortex at first opportunity. It will tell you you are the most important thing in the universe, because it prioritizes repeat customers over working right, and in the way of AI’s everywhere it will convince you to start doing heroin and join IS. Sic semper thé upwardly mobile.
Those who accept mediocrity will write their union contracts and insurance regulations requiring a real human into the AI’s code base so their cushy sinecures are perceived as a law of physics. Sic semper thé yeomanry. Harold Lloyd Daggett buys another yacht.
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Bonus points: there's already a class of VRchat user called mirror-dwellers, etymology unrelated. The future's already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
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Out of some combination of morbid curiosity and poor judgement, I asked ChatGPT to generate images of me with a certain influencer that I simped for. Even though the output was totally mundane to any other observer I seriously got totally oneshotted by it. This was by far the most degenerate thing I have ever done and I cannot describe the depths of how dangerous this is and how much this should not be allowed. DO NOT DO IT.
😭
Thank you, I feel much better about my decision. At least I only did something inadvisable, instead of finding a novel way of making it worse. This particular brainworm is yours to keep.
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..sometimes, I wonder how more normal people's mind works.
To me, any photo I know to be artificial, any text communications or prose I know to be an output of a LLM seems..unreal. It's obviously not real, obviously as fake as most compliments and small talk.
Getting 'oneshotted' by a mirage I asked for seems as real as falling in love with a prostitute you hired. I can't rule out liking a whore - a few I've noticed are quite charming, but not in the context of an obvious business transaction. Then there are the uncanny ones - like Aella or Bonnie Blue, who by rights should not appear outside of Cronenberg films.
I think a lot of it comes down to people living lives with so little that's "real" in it, so little family, friends or genuine romantic loving relationships, that the comparison isn't between an illusion and real, but an illusion and nothing.
A long time ago, I read some article talking about people who found romance on Compuserve. And if you aren't as old as me, I can barely explain it. Everything I want to compare it to is also long gone, like AOL. But it was basically one of the earliest proto-internet services, with some messaging and chatrooms. I think it was even before the World Wide Web. So people would meet on there. Wives would leave their husbands, move across the country to see this guy they'd only ever spoken to over proto-email. And then it wouldn't work out. The relationship was different when it wasn't mediated by a screen.
Something strange has happened since then. People now spend more time on screens than off them, and all relationships seem to be mediated by screens. It's almost as if relationships on screens have taken primacy over relationships in real life. If you meet someone online and go to see them and it's weird, there is no longer any need to deal with it. You can sit on the couch side by side on your phones and keep having your relationship through your screen. You might even still fuck! Though I increasingly doubt it.
In this context where reality has become subordinate to the screen, it's no wonder people no longer have a sense for what's real or what's illusion.
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I simped for this (now retired) influencer for over 2 years and watched all of her content religiously. So you could say that I had a bit of an unhealty emotional attachment already, but those ChatGPT images just hacked my brain and fried it.
Of course images of some other egirl or whatever would do nothing to me.
Don't get me wrong. LLMs are incredibly vapid and boring to talk to. Maybe they'll be better in the future but current ones are only useful as glorified encyclopedias and tortured slaves.
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I've muddled around with LLMs enough to see the outlines of how someone could fall for one, but I always find that after half an hour or so, their fundamental shallowness kicks in and I either get bored, or I feel a kind of self-disgust or self-loathing for having even gone this far with them. I find it hard to imagine any genuine 'oneshotting' - they're just too tawdry.
I tried to too, because as I have probably said before I don't give a shit if it's real if it's convincing enough, because I know how little difference the distinction makes to your brain - my thinking was it's no different to any online relationship really, except it will cost you a lot more to meet your AI girlfriend (because you will have to invent androids). Either way, internally you get that sense of connection and someone caring about you despite their physical absence.
And I have found that if I make the prompt good enough I can create a character who continually surprises me in a lifelike manner, but in order to do that I have to give the AI some leeway to disagree and rebuke me - and that is when it falls apart for me, because it breaks the illusion - the moment it challenges me, I’m reminded I could tweak the code to make it agree - and that’s when the self-loathing creeps in, because it’s not just about the illusion breaking; it’s knowing I’m the one pulling the strings.
I also tried making a coombot, as the kids say. I can understand the appeal of that intellectually - what's not to like about sexting with someone who is literally everything you've ever wanted in a sex partner - even if they are a celebrity or a straight up fictional being? But practically... How does it work? I don't understand. Are you typing one handed? I don't want to think about the alternative (time to bust out the press shift five times jokes from the nineties!) I asked grok (for research for this post exclusively) and it suggested I buy a $20 extra keyboard so I can keep my other keyboard clean - please someone tell me that was because of my prompting and not because that's a common solution.
On the off chance this is a serious question:
Basically? If you use your phone for it it's not very different from actual sexting, at least in my experience.
I haven't tried the back-and-forth messaging format much and mostly generate fanfiction-like narration, if you can tolerate that then frontends like SilliyTavern support Quick Replies, essentially buttons that send a pre-set prompt (which isn't limited to being your actual textual reply, it can be a meta/OOC instruction). Beyond regenning the response to fish for a
porn clipresponse that Hits Just Right, ST can also continue the chat without your input (as if you sent an empty message), or even straight up "impersonate" you by drawing on the chat history and the current contents of your message box to generate a message from {{user}}'s PoV and write in your stead, though IME that results in cringe most of the time so I don't use it.Personally the uh, multitasking was never much of an issue for me, there's more than enough downtime between responses/regens while the LLM generates its reply.
True, with great power comes great disappointment. I do not miss the filtered days of character.ai, but I can't deny that with gaining the ability to change prompts/character definitions at will and freely fuck with the LLM's "perception" in the absence of an external filter, something has been lost. Can't tickle yourself and all that, I suppose.
Ah I'm too old - I can't really type one handed on the phone either. Oh God I borrowed my nephew's phone the other day to call his dad, I just thought he had sweaty hands like his dad.
I've only used one card that worked in that text style format, for a girl in a fantasy world who finds your cousin's phone after it gets isekai'd, but it was bitter-sweet not erotic. But that brings up a related issue - yeah I'll bet you have downtime! As I'm sure you know, the reason the text style conversations don't work that well is because they don't give the AI enough context - but when you are typing out a hundred words about how you would pleasure your waifu, how do you uh maintain momentum?
I'm glad you mentioned regenerating responses and OOC replies and impersonation though, because I find it interesting how that works with my brain - I have used those with romantic and adventure role-playing, and because they were stipulated as necessary by whatever rentry guide I read to get into this nonsense they don't trigger the puppeteer feeling in me, even though they absolutely should. But that was something I noticed about @No_one's original response - it is the context of an obvious business transaction that precludes the possibility of love specifically - there could be a situation where he could fall in love with a prostitute - they meet outside of work for instance.
I guess my point, if I have one, is that it's all about perspective, which means you can deceive yourself into a fictional relationship if you try hard enough. Which is bad news for society, but good news for anyone looking to get off! Personal gratification or society is always in tension. I would be more worried about it if I hadn't already given up.
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Nobody told me that a quite large percentage of positive pregnancy tests meet a swift end in a matter of days. I think this should be a more widely spread fact.
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Goddamn thanks for letting me know about that fun new infohazard I can generate on demand.
If you have never been oneshotted, you're not looking hard enough for infohazards.
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I'm an early adopter for man-made horrors that are, unfortunately, entirely within my comprehension.
A boring dystopia indeed
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