relationships

All posts tagged relationships

On Caring about our AI Progeny

Posted by Peter on April 14, 2023
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence. Tagged: , . 1 comment

I encourage you to interact with GPT as you would interact with a friend, or as you would want your employer to treat you.

Treating other minds with respect is typically not costly. It can easily improve your state of mind relative to treating them as an adversary.

The tone you use in interacting with GPT will affect your conversations with it. I don’t want to give you much advice about how your conversations ought to go, but I expect that, on average, disrespect won’t generate conversations that help you more.

I don’t know how to evaluate the benefits of caring about any feelings that AIs might have. As long as there’s approximately no cost to treating GPT’s as having human-like feelings, the arguments in favor of caring about those feelings overwhelm the arguments against it.

Scott Alexander wrote a great post on how a psychiatrist’s personality dramatically influences what conversations they have with clients. GPT exhibits similar patterns (the Waluigi effect helped me understand this kind of context sensitivity).

Journalists sometimes have creepy conversations with GPT. They likely steer those conversations in directions that evoke creepy personalities in GPT.

Don’t give those journalists the attention they seek. They seek negative emotions. But don’t hate the journalists. Focus on the system that generates them. If you want to blame some group, blame the readers who get addicted to inflammatory stories.

P.S. I refer to GPT as “it”. I intend that to nudge people toward thinking of “it” as a pronoun which implies respect.

This post was mostly inspired by something unrelated to Robin Hanson’s tweet about othering the AIs, but maybe there was some subconscious connection there. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with dehumanizing other entities. When I dehumanize an entity, that is not sufficient to tell you whether I’m respecting it more than I respect humans, or less.

Spock: Really, Captain, my modesty…

Kirk: Does not bear close examination, Mister Spock. I suspect you’re becoming more and more human all the time.

Spock: Captain, I see no reason to stand here and be insulted.

Some possible AIs deserve to be thought of as better than human. Some deserve to be thought of as worse. Emphasizing AI risk is, in part, a request to create the former earlier than we create the latter.

That’s a somewhat narrow disagreement with Robin. I mostly agree with his psychoanalysis in Most AI Fear Is Future Fear.

The Explanation of Ideology

Posted by Peter on July 19, 2021
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems, by Emmanuel Todd.

What features distinguish countries that embraced communism from countries that resisted?

Why did Islam spread rapidly for a century and a half, then see relatively few changes in its boundaries for more than a millennium?

Todd’s answer is that the structure of the family is a good deal more stable than ideologies and religions, and different family structures create different constraints on what ideologies and religions will be accepted. Published in 1983, it still seems little-known.

Maybe this neglect is most pronounced in the English-speaking parts of the world, where one family structure is overwhelmingly popular, and alternatives are often dismissed as primitive relics. France seems more conducive to Todd’s insights, since France has four different family structures, each dominating in various regions.

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Daring Greatly

Posted by Peter on June 15, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brene Brown.

I almost didn’t read this because I was unimpressed by the TEDx video version of it, but parts of the book were pretty good (mainly chapters 3 and 4).

The book helped clarify my understanding of shame: how it differs from guilt, how it often constrains us without accomplishing anything useful, and how to reduce it.

She emphasizes that we can reduce shame by writing down or talking about shameful thoughts. She doesn’t give a strong explanation of what would cause that effect, but she prompted me to generate one: parts of my subconscious mind initially want to hide the shameful thoughts, and that causes them to fight the parts of my mind that want to generate interesting ideas. The act of communicating those ideas to the outside world convinces those censor-like parts of my mind to worry less about the ideas (because it’s too late? or because the social response is evidence that the censor was mistakenly worried? I don’t know).

I was a bit confused by her use of the phrase “scarcity culture”. I was initially tempted to imagine she wanted us to take a Panglossian view in which we ignore the resource constraints that keep us from eliminating poverty. But the context suggests she’s thinking more along the lines of “a culture of envy”. Or maybe a combination of perfectionism plus status seeking? Her related phrase “never enough” makes sense if I interpret it as “never impressive enough”.

I find it hard to distinguish those “bad” attitudes from the attitudes that seem important for me to strive for self-improvement.

She attempts to explain that distinction in a section on perfectionism. She compares perfectionism to healthy striving by noting that perfectionism focuses on what other people will think of us, whereas healthy striving is self-focused. Yet I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to hurt myself with perfectionism while focusing mostly on worries about how I’ll judge myself.

I suspect that healthy striving requires more focus on the benefits of success, and less attention to fear of failure, than is typical of perfectionism. The book hints at this, but doesn’t say it clearly when talking about perfectionism. Maybe she describes perfectionism better in her book The Gifts of Imperfection. Should I read that?

Her claim “When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection” feels important, and an area where I have trouble.

The book devotes too much attention to gender-stereotypical problems with shame. Those stereotypes are starting to look outdated. And it shouldn’t require two whole chapters to say that advice on how to have healthy interactions with people should also apply to relations at work, and to relations between parents and children.

The book was fairly easy to read, and parts of it are worth rereading.

Be Yourself

Posted by Peter on April 27, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , .

[An unimportant book that I read for ARC; feel free to skip this.]

Book review: Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken: Transform Your Life with the Power of Authenticity, by Mike Robbins.

This book’s advice mostly feels half-right, and mostly directed at people who have somewhat different problems than I have.

The book’s exercises range from things I’ve already done enough of, to things I ought to practice more but which feel hard (such as the self-love exercise).
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Anxiety Anxiety

Posted by Peter on October 19, 2016
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , , , .

I’ve substantially reduced my anxiety over the past 5-10 years.

Many of the important steps along that path look easy in hindsight, yet the overall goal looked sufficiently hard prospectively that I usually assumed it wasn’t possible. I only ended up making progress by focusing on related goals.

In this post, I’ll mainly focus on problems related to general social anxiety among introverted nerds. It will probably be much less useful to others.

In particular, I expect it doesn’t apply very well to ADHD-related problems, and I have little idea how well it applies to the results of specific PTSD-type trauma.

It should be slightly useful for anxiety over politicians who are making America grate again. But you’re probably fooling yourself if you blame many of your problems on distant strangers.

Trump: Make America Grate Again!

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Aletheia

Posted by Peter on June 7, 2015
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

I recently went to Aletheia, a workshop that helps people experience the creation of good interpersonal connections.

An important technique is to get people to focus on what is going on in their minds (especially emotions), and devote less attention to external objects/events. Beyond that they provided little explanation of how it works. But I see enough similarities to the advice on Charismatips.com that at an intellectual level the ideas behind it don’t seem very new.

My initial reaction was that the workshop had few ideas that seemed new to me, and wasn’t likely to influence me much. But by the middle of the workshop I felt myself being somewhat drawn toward the others in the group. I got the impression that many participants experienced more change than I did. I suspect the leaders were exercising more skill than I was able to observe directly.

I think I’ve noticed some subtle changes in how I interact with people that might be due to Aletheia, but whatever benefits I got are hard to evaluate.

Bonds That Make Us Free

Posted by Peter on November 10, 2014
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, by C. Terry Warner.

This book consists mostly of well-written anecdotes demonstrating how to recognize common kinds of self-deception and motivated cognition that cause friction in interpersonal interactions. He focuses on ordinary motives that lead to blaming others for disputes in order to avoid blaming ourselves.

He shows that a willingness to accept responsibility for negative feelings about personal relationships usually makes everyone happier, by switching from zero-sum or negative-sum competitions to cooperative relationships.

He describes many examples where my gut reaction is that person B has done something that justifies person A’s decision to get upset, and then explaining that person A should act nicer. He does this without the “don’t be judgmental” attitude that often accompanies advice to be more understanding.

Most of the book focuses on the desire to blame others when something goes wrong, but he also notes that blaming nature (or oneself) can produce similar problems and have similar solutions. That insight describes me better than the typical anecdotes do, and has been a bit of help at enabling me to stop wasting effort fighting reality.

I expect that there are a moderate number of abusive relationships where the book’s advice would be counterproductive, but that most people (even many who have apparently abusive spouses or bosses) will be better off following the book’s advice.

Alexithymia

Posted by Peter on September 5, 2011
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

As part of my efforts to improve my relationship skills, I read many of the posts on CharismaTips.com. It’s a site oriented towards male geeks who want better dating skills, but it appears to be useful for a broader range of personal interactions, and is oriented toward geeks.

I ran into more trouble than I expected when I tried to follow this advice:

Make a list of every positive emotion you can think of. For each emotion write down a short headline to a story, moment, or experience, when you felt that emotion.

After much research, I decided that a large part of the problem was connected with Alexithymia. According to Wikipedia it is:

a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions.

  1. difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
  2. difficulty describing feelings to other people
  3. constricted imaginal processes, as evidenced by a scarcity of fantasies
  4. a stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style.

Talking about emotions is reportedly valuable in creating a feeling of closeness with another person, but when I try to think of stories I might tell about emotions, I often come up completely blank, or remember situations where the context suggests I felt something corresponding to an emotion, but for which I’m unable to find a memory of feelings. I think my mood is often best described as neutral, which I gather isn’t the case for most people.

from another paper:

Therefore, alexithymia is viewed as “blindfeel”, the emotional equivalent of blindsight. According to this thesis, alexithymia is a deficit in reaching the conscious awareness and in maintaining the voluntary control of emotions, rather than a disruption in the sensory/perceptual aspect of emotions.

One of the tests for Alexithymia suggests that it is associated with low interest in sex, although I can’t find much evidence on that subject. I certainly feel much less interest in sex than the average person.

I wonder if one of the reasons I don’t form many close relationships with people is that I don’t notice any reactions in me corresponding to what people call “love at first sight”. If I’ve ever felt even mild versions of that, I can’t recall them.

Alexithymia also seems to affect people’s reactions to music:

an apparent reduction in emotional responsiveness to music in the ASD group can be accounted for by the higher mean level of alexithymia in that group.

I don’t notice myself reacting to music by itself, but it does seem to manipulate my emotions when it’s part of a movie.

Alexithymia is clearly a separate phenomenon from Aspergers/autism, but it is reported to occur in 50% to 85% of autistic people. It could be responsible for a significant fraction of the problems autistics have relating to other people. In particular, autism by itself doesn’t seem to cause problems with eye contact:

only the degree of alexithymia, and not autism symptom severity, predicted eye fixation.

There don’t seem to be any good ideas for dealing with Alexithymia, although that might reflect how little research has been done so far rather than any inherent difficulty.

The most promising claim I’ve found is this:

So how did I “cure” myself? It’s a bit of a long story but I will give you some bits of it for now.

One of the things I did was to start to read about feelings. This might have started giving me the vocabulary.

Something else I did was I started taking time to think about my feelings. To reflect on them.

Then I also started to write about them in personal journals.

I’m starting to do this, but it clearly won’t produce clear results soon.

I’ve bought and used a dvd designed to teach people how to recognize emotions in faces. It’s got a lot of potentially useful information in it, but it leaves much to be desired – I’m fairly sure it’s mistaken to list lying as a detectable emotion (guilt or fear of detection are detectable, but the most rigorous studies seem to say that people rarely do much better than chance at detecting lies). I’m unsure whether I’m learning much from it.

Relational Mobility and Self-Disclosure

Posted by Peter on December 2, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Research indicates that cultures in which relationships can be formed and dissolved relatively easily produce more disclosure of intimate information between friends, probably due to a combination of greater need to invest in each relationship and lesser harm from taking risks that alter relationships.

The study compared Japanese culture to U.S. culture, but my impression is that there has also been a significant change over time in the U.S., with internet access increasing relationship mobility, followed by an increase in self-disclosure. (It’s possible that my impression was due to my move from New England to Silicon Valley in 1994 – there’s more social mobility in Silicon Valley, but I didn’t notice much change in self-disclosure until several years later).

It seems likely that the effects of the web on relationship mobility and self-disclosure will grow larger. The trend of increasing mobility has shown few signs of slowing, and the effects on self-disclosure probably lag by at least a few years.

Brainiac Dating

Posted by Peter on September 26, 2010
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: .

Brainiac Dating recently added two search features which create the potential for it to be one of my favorite dating sites: one that matches people based on books listed in their profiles, and one that matches people based on overlap of all the words in their profiles.

Unfortunately, before adding those features the site was sufficiently uninspired that few people joined, so it’s hard to verify that the features are working as advertised. Please spread the word that they’ve become worth trying.