Heaven's Littlest Fallen Angel

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Due to my weird childhood and my weird brain, I have this very unhelpful compulsion to conceal Everything I do from Everyone. I Cannot be observed performing any action, no matter how mundane. My nervous system is convinced I'm gonna, like, Get In Trouble for eating food at dinnertime or sleeping in my bed at bedtime.

And we shall return from whence we came.

Let's say I really wanted to reduce the number of children who die in car accidents. Car accidents are really bad, right? Nobody disagrees about that. And it would be much better for both the environment and the kids' health if they spent more time walking, or taking the bus. Perfectly reasonable. More cars off the road, safer roads, fewer kids getting hurt, healthier kids. A win-win!

The thing we're about to learn in this current wave of social media bans is just how much of the infrastructure of our society we have allowed to be captured by a handful of social media companies. And thus, how much of the world we are shutting a whole demographic out of by banning it for them. If we decide as a society that we want to do this, we can't do it without building the equivalent of a robust public transit network first.

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