If it was an order of male monks found with 800 dead babies, “men are absolute monsters” would absolutely among the top comments.

Just the age we live in.

Completely fair.

For the record I am a socialist who thinks all billionaires and most to all centimillionaires are as mentally diseased as serial killers and far more effectively destructive to society than any serial killer that has ever walked the earth, and they all belong in mental health facilities for everyone else’s safety to protect us from their sociopathic avarice disease.

ChatGPT and the others have absolutely broken people, not because it has agency, but because in our dystopia of social media and (Mis)information overload, many just need the slightest push, and LLMs are perfect for taking those close to the edge off of it.

I see LLM use as potentially as a toxic to the mind is as something like nicotine is to the body. It’s not Skynet meaning to harm or help us, it’s an invention that takes our written thoughts and blasts back a disturbing meta reflection/echo/output of a humanity’s average response to it. We don’t seem to care how that will effect us psychologically when there’s profit to be made.

But there are already plenty of cases of murders and suicides with these as factors.

In philosophy, It’s a core concept called solipsism.

The encouraged answer to it is don’t think about it and best to move on, even within philosophy, because asking the questions that actually matter about the nature of the mind and existence, are a terrible drain on productivity and GDP, and those are most certainly real and totes important things that must exist 🤣

Ah yes solipsism, the principle that we cannot actually know… anything at all… beyond knowing that we ourself exist in some form because we are presently thinking about it, be it as an algorithm running in a simulation, or a brain in a jar being tortured with hallucinations on some 5th dimensional being’s shelf.

I remember chuckling to myself upon learning that the answer to this situation is just don’t think about it because it isn’t productive.

Problem with that is It seems like a perfectly rational argument against the pursuit of productivity.

Just like joining a military, some people are born sheep and need to cling to a rigid structure to thrive. Without it, you have all sorts of nasty consequences from people who can’t self-actualize and need to believe in being part of something magical that has a plan for them.

Not something I’d ever want for myself, but as I get older I’ve come to realize that there are many people, people that con artists like Reagan, Trump, McConnell, and every Mega Church leader ever, capitalize and prey on because they need to be told what to think to feel safe.

I don’t think the answer is to abolish the crutches of the weak minded, so much as for society through representative government to regulate what they teach to minimize the potential for turning the structure weak minds crave into a potential army of useful idiots for those that would coopt such movements.

Still miss baconreader

Trump is a witch confirmed.

I can be bribed into supporting that with king crab and salmon.

Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.

Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.

Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn’t throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.

For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you’re out of luck.

How does it solve anything beyond the shortest of terms to keep seeing salvation in a party thats been creeping right in line with the Fascists for half a century?

What will your opinion be in another 5-8 years when the Democrats have followed the Overton window into calling for extralegal deportations of naturalized citizens and Republicans are just calling for the whites to shoot the non-whites in the street with impunity?

“Better support the Democrats, they only want to deport those people to foreign prisons not execute them on the sidewalk! Get that both sides crap out of here!”

-You in 5 years, probably.

Promises promises.

They count on us dragging each other down, because they want to believe we’re all as greedy and sociopathic as they are. It helps them hurt us guilt free to believe that.

That’s what McCarthyism was all about, attacking, shaming, and scarlet lettering Americans who did the unthinkable and empathized and encouraged …gasp… cooperation with others rather than gleefully competing against them.