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Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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I'm right there with you. The big question in my mind is: will socializing with hyper-socially-intelligent AIs make people more or less socially retarded when interacting with other humans? I can see it going either way. Maybe it won't matter much - our future human friendships and marriages (if any) might simply explicitly be mediated by AI, and perhaps be better for it.

That sounds like a nice prompt for an "odd couple" comedy - an old married couple whose AI intermediary / life coach breaks down, and they're forced to interact bare-brained, so to speak, for the first time.

Good point that we already are the hyper-socially-competent layer mediating between unpleasant chimp brains.

Maybe I need to tell my friends that they had better step up their focus, social graces, and diction if they want to compete with ChatGPT.

I'm happy to ignore Are You Smarter than a Large Language Model? Seems better to turn off the TV. Priorities, man.

As long as the world isn't exploding, I don't think I need that kind of pointless dialectic.

I agree it sounds harsh, but you're the one that said

Why even bother with bio-souls?

If I was planning to spend less time with my friends in favor of an AI, it might be a dickish thing to be honest about, but saying why would at least give them a chance to fix the problem.

Wrong person, though it's my bad for cutting in. I just don't get the point of conversations with ChatGPT like the one quoted above.

Again, my bad for cutting in. I'll freely admit that I posted without thinking. But you know, in a way this response sums up my initial intuitions about this whole thing.

If your anger stems from me being an idiot without grace or common sense, you would be right, but it also seems like you're prioritizing the fluff of conversation and not the meat. You might as well click a random page in the Library of Babel and learn how to use the I Ching on it. Sometimes you just have to say no, and you'll never find what you're looking for until you grasp what this feels like in practice.

I'm afraid I cannot put this into a more thoughtful form than this at present, so perhaps you would be right to declare victory and move on. But I doubt it.