The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
Reposting because I dropped this in the last Wednesday thread on a Tuesday like a dummy.
Could anyone direct me to some good posts about antidepressants? Effortposts about their efficacy, personal experience, I'm not picky. I tried to find some but Google wasn't much use and I can't figure out how to search the site specifically (permanent lurker here, sorry).
I was on Bupropion for 2 years about a decade ago. For the first year it was helpful in managing a depression that manifested with lots of fatigue. It gave me the energy to make lifestyle changes that improved it long term. During the second year it began causing unmanageable anger issues and I eventually stopped. Ever since then my lifestyle changes and talk therapy have managed it reasonably well.
Lately it's been getting worse and I'm considering going back on antidepressants. The main issue is that unambiguously good events exacerbate my depression and that has historically led to me sabotaging myself. I have some major life events coming up in the next couple years and would like some emotional stability. I have a psych eval tomorrow and I was hoping for some advice, feedback, pointed questions to ask the psychiatrist, stories, anything really. Even some google-fu advice to find better scientific information about this instead of feel-good self help articles made by AI or journalists who are about as smart as current AI without the work ethic. Do I even need antidepressants, or is this some weird Pavlovian issue that I can work on without them?
You need a psychiatrist. I am only two-thirds of one, but fortunately for you, I've got exams and that means actually reading some of the papers.
(Please see an actual psychiatrist)
The choice of initial antidepressant is often a tossup between adherence to official guidelines, clinical judgements based on activity profile and potential side effects, and a dialogue with the patient.
In short? It is usually not very helpful to worry too hard about the first drug. They're roughly equally effective (and where one is superior, it's by a very slim margin) But in certain situations:
(But before the meds, a physical checkup is mandatory, as are investigations to rule out medical causes. You're going to feel depressed if your thyroid isn't working, or if you've got Cushing's.)
Unfortunately, you haven't given me enough information to make an informed choice. I'd need to know about the severity of your depression, graded based on symptoms, lifestyle, overall health and a bunch of other things. Hopefully your actual doctor will do their due diligence.
Man you are either an irredeemable slopmonger or spending so much time immersed in slop that your own writing is becoming indistinguishable.
Wow.
I guess we have to expand the taxonomy of LLM psychosis, to account for people so paranoid/blind that they see AI the moment someone bothers to use markdown formatting. If bullet points are all it takes to set you off, then one to the brain is probably the best possible cure.
I've always written like this. You're welcome to trawl my profile back to the days when LLMs were largely useless, and you'll find the same results.
And, for what it's worth, that comment was hastily typed out while in the midst of studying actual notes on antidepressant prescription according to UK guidance. You just can't win.
Guess what? The LLMs have read the same literature. There isn't much room to put some kind of unique human spin on the basics of choosing and switching between antidepressants. If ChatGPT had written it for me, it would have been thrice as long, and probably more comprehensive. In which case, I am flattered to be mistaken for it.
Dude, I've been on here... I don't remember actually, but a long time before I saw you show up. Taking your word that you aren't just feeding questions into the machine for whatever reasons -- your writing has become super ugly over the past six months or so. Your bluster only confirms that you've lost the plot as to what good writing even looks like.
(and you might want to read better if you think it's the bullet points)
I'll save you the bother. We've both been on themotte.org since September 2022. I've been a user of /r/TheMotte since just after it split off from the CWR thread on /r/SSC.
And in the span of 3 years, the only notable events in your mod log are two warnings. Not a single AAQC, and people stumble into those by accident. I'll welcome your criticism about my writing style when you write something to impress me first. Or even impress anyone, I don't select the nominees, those are largely on the basis of popular opinion. It takes as little as one person hitting report.
When someone like @Amadan or @2rafa or @phailyoor or.... criticizes my writing style or my very limited use of AI (in this case, exactly zero), I listen. When I didn't even use the damn thing, I'm not going to care very much about your unfounded concerns. If you don't like the self_made_human house style, you're entirely at liberty to not read it.
I see nothing wrong with the post above. It seems perfectly informative. I can't say whether or not your writing has changed, but you your recent posts seem perfectly well written.
I hate false AI accusations with a passion because they take away credibility from real ones. There's so much actual slop out there that's blindingly obvious.
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Since I got tagged in here:
I have no real opinion on your post that set this off, and believe you that you didn't use AI to write it.
I do think your style has gotten worse since you became such an AI enthusiast, mostly in that it is more wordy and "tryhard." I do strongly suspect it's the LLM influence, which you think is a good thing because they "write well," but the thing is, mostly they don't. They write very fluently. They can fill space with words, words that sometimes sound lyrical or profound, but... it's empty.
It's hard to describe without going into a much longer post about writing style, but it's very similar to the debate over AI art. I am not an AI art hater, I think occasionally it can produce really cool stuff, but mostly it's good for outputting placeholder art that gets the job done... you know, D&D characters or "I have a picture in my head that would be cool to see rendered but I don't want to pay someone to draw it" or bland corporate stuff. Notwithstanding Scott's AI Art Turing test, most AI art is very, very recognizeable as AI. You know the look: a little too polished, a little too saturated, a little too uniform in tone and shade and crosshatching (even when prompter tries to make it draw in different styles), an emptiness in the eyes... the illustration might be perfect in form, we don't see six-fingered hands or necklaces that meld with shoulders as much anymore, but it's still full of tiny details and stylistic choices that a human artist wouldn't make. And it's all very samey, like imagine every single artist in the world graduating from CalArts and trying as hard as possible to replicate the CalArts style.
AI writing is the same!
It's not just the tells (em-dashes, "It's not X, it's Y"), which like six-fingered hands and necklaces melding into shoulders, LLMs are starting to be trained not to do so predictably. It's the sameness, the pseudo-profound verbosity, the fluency that mistakes many pretty-sounding-words chained together in grammatically correct sentences as saying something prettily.
You are starting to write like a guy who reads LLM output and thinks "Yeah, that's good writing!" As if all those CalArts students were starting to take their art classes from ChatGPT and imitating LLM style instead.
Maybe in the future, maybe even in the near future, AI will improve enough to make this moot. We don't have LLMs that can write entire novels in one shot yet, and even with lots of prompting, the novels they can write are absolute crap. But I have no doubt people will read them, just like people read progressive fantasies and litrpgs that are absolute crap in terms of writing style (* cough * Reverend Insanity * cough * ) There is no accounting for taste, and some people don't actually care about style and craft and skill beyond basic get-the-job-doneness. "Give me words that tell a story, and make the story interesting. Give me pixels that form big round boobies and a waifu fuck-me face."
That's... fine, I guess? But don't mistake it for good.
I think that fact that you are defensive about this is kind of weird. Like you are insecure either about your own writing, or about the potential of LLMs, or about the intersection of those two things.
There's a writer on Medium I kind of casually follow for his trainwreck-of-a-life stories, and he gets dragged regularly for writing posts that scream "ChatGPT." He has admitted he uses AI for research, outlining, sometimes phrasing, but "he writes it all himself" and after another post that got a bunch of people calling him an LLM, he wrote a long, huffy, defensive post about how this is his writing style, this is how he's always written, ChatGPT is copying him, not the other way around, and fuck the haters. And, well, I guess I believe him if he says he's not actually letting ChatGPT write his posts for him (I don't, really, I think he's letting ChatGPT "outline" his posts and then he does some editing and tweaking and calls it "his writing"). But the degree of his defensiveness really convinced me he knows he's using too much AI in his writing.
Note that I am not saying you're doing the same thing, just... I think you know you're outsourcing too much to AI, and now you're getting pissy when people point it out.
On that note:
AI detectors are themselves not that reliable, since the ability to detect AI writing is a moving target, so posting "An AI detector said my writing is 100% human" is probably not that convincing to most people. (Just as many people have had the displeasure of seeing something they know they wrote themselves tagged as "almost certainly AI" by an AI detector.)
I do not think we should be using mod logs to tell people "You are a crap poster so I dismiss your argument."
I disagree! I do not think that the majority of LLM output is worth reading. That is not the same as LLMs being incapable of good writing. Getting something decent out of them takes effort. Not some kind of overcomplicated prompt engineering nonsense, but more effort than bad actors take.
To illustrate, I can truthfully claim that Xianxia as a genre is sloppy trash (most of it is) while simultaneously arguing that Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. The selection process is what allows for a recommendation.
As you can see, we have irreconcilable differences. Pistols at dawn?
I really can't win. If I stay quiet and ignore things: avoidant behavior. If I just say that, yeah, I've used AI, that is a no-contest. If I actually take a stand, then suddenly the lady doth protest too much. Nah, this lady has principles, and is willing to argue them.
I have heard claims that Pangram is better than most. For example, it's batting 100% here, admittedly, for a single sample. To the extent that people have used AI detectors on me in an attempt to shore up their argument that I'm using AI (in a post where I allude to the fact I'm using it), then I feel entitled to use them myself. If it works, then you believe in my probable innocence, if you believe it doesn't work, then you had no reason to consider me guilty beyond what I've already confessed.
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Not @jkf, and don't particularly want to get caught in this shit-storm. I also acknowledge I like your writing, I think it's some of the most consistent and interesting posting here. I also think you are a much better writer than me, so if that's your standard for receiving feedback feel free to just ignore the rest.
All that being said. It is uncanny, I have more than once in the last week been interacting with ChatGTP and thought "This could just as well be a Mechanical Turk and @self_made_human is on the other side." It's not just the use of bullet points, it's your tone, word choice, argument structure. It's not just the use of markdown, it's extremely machine like choice of formatting. I don't know what pangram looks for, they probably don't disclose to prevent people from gaming their system. And I'm not going to scrape the (already brittle) motte to do a textual analysis. But jfk is not the only one who has noticed that your writing has picked up somthing from ChatGTP.
Do you honestly not think your writing style has not changed at all over the course of three years? I think it's would be extraordinarily unlikely that someones writing style does not change at all over the course of years in their 20s. If you acknowledge your style has changed, is your claim it's directionality away from LLM style?
This strikes me a quite distasteful. It strikes me as someone being upset they got some criticism, then decided to use their mod powers to make an ad hominem attack rather than ignoring or addressing the criticism. If you really don't care what the lesser writers here think of your style, why bother to dig through the mod log?
Edit: I wanted to add. I'm not saying you shouldn't adopt LLM style if that's what you want. I'm saying if that's not what you want, look out for it. It's possible other people can see it in your writing before you do, and it would be sad to loose a unique and interesting voice because someone accidentally let theirs get co-opted by a machine.
My apologies. I was very annoyed, for what I hope were understandable reasons. I'm happy to accept feedback when it's not framed as a personal attack alongside, IMO, very poor justification. I'm happy to hear what you have to say!
Hmm.
The thing is, markdown is cool and incredibly powerful. LLM chatbots like ChatGPT (that aren't base models), are under heavy selection pressure to conform to human preferences. That means a convergence to certain norms, because the average user or RLHF monkey prefers! Headlines, emphasis, bullet points, em-dashes — they're all useful. They make text more legible and help it flow better.
In other words, I've come to appreciate the benefits to writing in a certain structure. I personally prefer it, and I think the majority do (by revealed preference) and it strikes some people as AI-like. The last bit is an unfortunate side effect.
(I would say a bigger influence is Scott. I'm a fanboy, and his advice is solid)
I'm not sure what you mean by a change in tone or word choice, though I make an intentional effort to be less acerbic these days.
However:
I do use AI, sometimes! I've never tried to hide it, or deny its influence when anyone asks. That does not mean that any of my posts are writtrn by AI. I use LLMs for research, fact checking, proof-reading and editorial purposes.
That usually entails writing a draft, then submitting it into an LLM for advice or critique, which I may or may not use.
I think this is entirely above board, and I champion its use. It is categorically not the same as throwing a prompt into a box and then getting the AI to do the heavy lifting. The AI is an editor, not a ghostwriter.
Precisely the opposite. My style has changed, for what I think is the better. I'd hope so, given that I must have written like 1-5 million words in between, including a novel. It has also become more LLM-like, but that is because I like some of the things LLMs do, and not because I'm replaced by an LLM. Case in point, I've never had anyone accuse me of including unsourced or inaccurate information, even when they're criticizing my style, because it's a point of pride that I always review anything an LLM tells me.
When I said:
I mean that that specific comment had zero AI in it, and is of a style that strikes me as self_made_human from a few years back, as raw as it gets. It was quickly jotted off, with none of the usual edits, revisions or edit passes I make a point of doing manually. It is as me as it gets, and wouldn't be out of place three years back. It lacks the effort and polish I aspire to today.
Hell, I was doubly mad because I made an intentional effort not to succumb to just asking him to check ChatGPT (which would have given him excellent advice on a topic as done to death as this one) since he clearly wanted a more personal touch. I didn't even ask ChatGPT to write boilerplate that I could have theoretically co-opted as my own. I saw the comment, noticed, hey, I'm actually studying NICE guidance on initiating and managing antidepressant usage, and decided to just scribble down my understanding of best practice. I am, after all, mostly a shrink, even if I'm got more shrinking to do.
So, here I am, providing what I hope is accurate and helpful advice, the old-fashioned way, and someone comes along and starts shit. I might be a moderator, but I have my limits. Anyone calling me a "slopmonger" can fuck right off. As this current example of discourse demonstrates, I am more than happy to be civil and take pains to explain myself if the other person extends me the same courtesy. I appreciate that you have.
https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/354239?context=8#context
Here is a thread outlining my stance towards prior accusations of AI usage, where I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that I have used it (when I've actually used it). You'll notice that I've spent a great deal of time explaining the same thing to jkf in good faith, in an attempt to convince him of the merits of my stance. That hasn't worked, and I am offended by new accusations when the evidence on display is very clearly not AI. It's like someone going around with a loudspeaker telling people I'm a sex offender, when the rap was for public urination while drunk. Even if it was technically correct (it wasn't here), I have little energy to spare to have this argument again.
Alternatively, this:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/354252?context=8#context
I don't think opening the moderation log is an abuse of mod power in any meaningful sense. Moderation actions are public, anyone can see them on the sidebar. The panel only shows me the ones linked to a specific user. I didn't slap him with a ban, or start a fight. Moderators are only human, mea culpa.
If he's going to call me a slopmonger, when I think I've got more than enough evidence of engagement (presumably high quality, though everyone is at liberty to form their own opinions, I'm not your dad, I think), then I feel within my rights to point out that he has almost nothing to his name, and what he does is negative. It's genuinely impressive to have been here so long and still achieve so little. Both lurking moar or engaging less are valid options.
And I hope that I have demonstrated, to your satisfaction, that I am usually open to criticism, and have, in fact, had this same conversation with him in the past.
I personally find attacks around past contributions somewhat distasteful, because it doesn't really address the argument itself directly. I'd much rather see "You're absolutely wrong, retard", than "post more before criticizing people".
If someone's so obviously wrong, you don't even have to explain why, as hopefully the intelligent audience will be able to tease out the truth just from having it pointed out.
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I'm not even against using a LLM to refine your writing. I wish I had so I wouldn't have made that annoying set of typos.
I do think that particular bit of criticism was poorly formed, and I would have been very annoyed as well. I didn't understand of all posts to try to call out like that you would choose that one. Somehow I thought it would be unhelpful to leave it as if it was just one user trolling you though.
Ironically, maybe that is what I've been noticing. I think, I'm probably unreasonably annoyed by that cloying droll persona that they give the average chatbot. I suppose, liking a slightly facetious and combative tone is slightly pathological on my part.
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ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer)
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