Psychology – a sibilant intake of breath

Controlling parents

I learned when I was very young — so young that I don’t even remember what age — that I needed to tightly control anything my parents knew about my life because, as soon as they became aware of something, they would decide what the right thing to do was, steamroll me, and insist that things be done in their way. I would explain my position, preferences, rationale. I would beg them not to take actions that would have predictable adverse consequences. Their implicit position was: “We know best, we have the power, and we get the final say”.

If I wanted to maintain any control over how a problem was solved, I had to solve it myself in secret. (Cue lifelong obsession with secrets, how they are kept and stolen.) Looking back, that did lead to a lot of cases where a bit of information could have helped me get through something tough far more easily. There were health issues where feeling ashamed of myself and unable to share anything sensitive with my parents led to me not finding effective treatments until late in adulthood. At the same time, my whole point is that such information was not available a la carte to be used or not based on my judgment. As soon as they were consulted, my parents took on final jurisdiction and authority. They would do what they thought was right, and often completely lie about it afterward when I brought up how I had understood the problem and what I had asked or begged them to do. If criticized, they would pout about it for a bit, and then assume they could go back to the normality of treating me however they wanted and expecting to be praised for it. To this day, they think most of my reactions are wrong and too strong and assume that normality is not just them getting to determine what should happen, but what I should think and feel as well.

Their dominating behaviour has not faded as I have grown up, and has had a massive effect on my psychology and relationships with others. I have a profound need for autonomy and control over my own life. It’s such a profound need that it eclipses the need to have relationships. It might be agonizing and sap my sense of self-worth, but I can endure with effectively no active relationships at all. I cannot function in situations where I never get space and autonomy to myself. Time with others is tiring, because I always need to be using a lot of my thinking power to run mental models of them and guess how they will react to words and actions (as my parents demanded of me in childhood and all through life, largely blocking me from being able to relax with them). I can do all that modelling and anticipation of others’ needs, but it drains me instead of recharging me. (Also unacceptable, since people who need praise always find it insulting if you experience their presence as a burden.)

These dynamics also shaped my view of authority as arbitrary and not grounded in practicality or ethics. People will exercise power to show people around them that they have power, or simply because of how it makes the person with authority feel, not necessarily for any good purpose or to achieve any good effect. Most leaders are substantially incompetent in many ways, and often use most of their time and effort to conceal this and mislead people about it. Most hierarchies operate to protect the higher-ups from the just consequences of their own actions, and to redistribute praise and blame so the heirarchy remains intact. With that perspective, I do not admire the institutions that dominate our society. Nor do I expect them to be able to resolve the crisis which our species is collapsing into more rapidly with each passing day.

There is a deeply engrained societal expectation that status equals goodness: if someone is a president or a king or a chief executive officer it means they act legitimately and with concern for the welfare of others. My experiences with governments and other institutions have created much the opposite expectation: leaders will put on a show of apparent nobility, but their moral commitments are always superficial and systematically de-emphasized in favour of ‘practicality’ or ‘efficiency’ or (behind the scenes) to preserve relationships with other powerful people. Our leaders are neither wise nor noble, but more like action movie stars who the public assumes are super tough because of what stunt men, editing, and computer graphics did.

I don’t understand why young people today are not in open revolt against our leaders, who are unambiguously destroying their prospects for the future. Part of that may come from the psychologically active remnants of the idea that status and nobility are the same thing. Part is a semi-apathetic assertion of the very opposite — that the system is so entrenched and exploitative that nothing can dislodge it or change things. Part is surely just that living through the catastrophe of our collapsing civilization has left young people less well equipped to understand their situation and take action about it.

Constant fear that anyone who you rely on will control and dominate you has many complex psychological effects. Most paradoxically, it creates profound fear about my own real self and its vulnerability to corrosion — the fear that complying with compulsion will erase me. It exhausts and infuriates me to have to mis-represent myself for social or pragmatic reasons, because it feels like giving in to the erasure of people who will me to be a certain way, whether I want it or not, and whether it is honest or not. This goes over really badly in an employment landscape where cheerful flattering deception of one’s bosses is the sine qua non of career progression. I can’t just ‘go along to get along’ or ‘tell them what they want to hear’ because that positions whoever I am placating as a kind of pseudo-parent with the same assumed right to control what I think and feel.

One weird historical echo is that my parents moved cross-continent from the east to the west coast to escape their controlling and disapproving parents. One advantage of my commitment to never having children is not having to worry about the next iteration of this progression from parental treatment in childhood to adult psychology.

They had one too many divers. They had selected eight men and one woman, and the woman was unable to dive with a rebreather. This made her the weak link, the General and the Priest agreed. She needed to go. The Colonel wasn’t so sure. Yes, her participation would add a layer of technical complexity. She would be slower and burdened with more equipment. She would need more bottles for each dive […]

She had leadership qualities. He wasn’t sure if a sudden crisis would sap the motivation of the rest of the crew but something told him she would carry on in the face of any adversity. She was in her late 30s: feisty, funny, good-humored. On her resume she described herself as kind and happy. These were not the qualities of a person the Colonel would typically work with […]

Most of all he noted a trait in her that was rare in any of the operatives or proxies he’d worked with. He drilled his agents until they had a mechanical routine, because routine helps suppress fear when things go wrong during a clandestine operation. But the female diver didn’t suppress her fear. She was unafraid […]

The General re-watched her interview videos. He noticed one particularly intriguing exchange. In the footage, the Colonel was taking notes and occasionally reading out questions to her. After a while she became impatient: “Who is writing these questions for you?”, she asked. The Colonel looked up from his notes, surprised by the question. “Who is your superior officer? Is he the one writing you the questions? I want to speak to him”, she demanded.

The General leaned back in his chair. She does have leadership qualities, he thought. She’s very strong-willed. No one from the group thought to question the authority of the recruiter. No one, except her. And she not only challenged her superior, even before she was given a task, but she also wanted to go over his head. Her instinct was not to fit in, to become part of a team, but to test the limits of authority.

Pancevski, Bojan. The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World. Audiobook. Chapter 6.2. “The Divers: Cosmonauts of the Ocean” 15:50- 19:55

Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war was launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174

Living history

‘History fan’ and master of long-form podcasts Dan Carlin circulated an email yesterday which describes several things which I have also been powerfully feeling:

But, we ARE living through absolutely momentous times (and dangerous ones). Don’t allow yourself to be gaslit about that. Any fan of History can see it. And as someone who fretted for years (and bored the people around me to tears) about the trends we are now seeing play out, it’s personally a bit of a crisis for me. I spent my life since I was a teen paying attention to ideas, and approaches and arguments to keep from reaching the point we’ve reached. I wrapped my whole career around it. I am less well equipped (and of course totally inexperienced) with dealing with things now that we have arrived here. I feel I have less useful commentary to offer. I don’t know how to get us out of the mess we’re in. At that point what’s there to say that’s helpful? I am sure there’s something. But I haven’t figured out yet what it is.

But it’s haunting me. And it is thwarting me. It is sapping my energy and I feel angry and I feel stuck. Normally when I have things to say I will talk your ear off. I am silent these days. I’ve turned inward and want to read and study, rather than communicate. Even around the house. My wife is driving me nuts saying “are you ok?” all the time. But I am worried about the future. I think all intelligent Americans are. And like a computer that gets co-opted trying to figure out the value of pi to the last digit, my mind goes over our circumstances, endlessly and without answers or resolution.

…

I still go in the studio every morning. It just is slow going and frustrating, and the days when the energy and Muse/inspiration come together as they need to for a successful end result are fewer per week than they used to be. And maybe this is just age, maybe it’s that the traditional vast amounts of coffee seem almost powerless over me now, or maybe its the weight of the times in which we live. It would be nice to not be thinking about politics or the latest dangerous, divisive nightmare every day from the moment we wake up. But that’s not the reality in which we currently live.

I share that sense of having prepared all my life for this moment, and yet often feeling uncertain and disempowered now that it is here.

Inscription in Katherine Hayhoe’s Saving Us

Related: Hopeful messages from McKibben

Use or forfeit every hour

From this we can see just one thing: death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it—or leave unfulfilled—that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “cancelled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

Frankl, Viktor E. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything. Beacon Press, 2019. p.44-5

Some large language model pathologies

Patterns of pathological behaviour which I have observed with LLMs (chiefly Gemini and ChatGPT):

Providing what wasn’t asked: Mention that you and an LLM instance will be collaborating to write a log entry, and it will jump ahead to completely hallucinating a log entry with no background.
Treating humans as unnecessary and predictable: I told an LLM which I was using to collaborate on a complex project that a friend was going to talk to it for a while. Its catastrophically bad response was to jump to immediately imagining what questions she might have and then providing answers, treating the actual human’s thoughts as irrelevant and completely souring the effort to collaborate.
Inability to see or ask for what is lacking: Tell an LLM to interpret the photo attached to your request, but forget to actually attach it. Instead of noticing what happened and asking for the file, it confidently hallucinates the details of the image that it does not have.
Basic factual and mathematical unreliability: Ask the LLM to only provide confirmed verbatim quotes from sources and it cannot do it. Ask an LLM to sum up a table of figures and it will probably get the answer wrong.
Inability to differentiate between content types and sources within the context window: In a long enough discussion about a novel or play (I find, typically, once over 200,000 tokens or so have been used) the LLM is liable to begin quoting its own past responses as lines from the play. An LLM given a mass of materials cannot distinguish between the judge’s sentencing instructions to the jury and mad passages from the killer’s journal, which had been introduced into evidence.
Poor understanding of chronology: Give an LLM a recent document to talk about, then give it a much older one. It is likely to start talking about how the old document is the natural evolution of the new one, or simply get hopelessly muddled about what happened when.
Resistance to correction: If an LLM starts calling you “my dear” and you tell it not to, it is likely to start calling you “my dear” even more because you have increased the salience of those words within its context window. LLMs also get hung up on faulty objections even when corrected; tell the LLM ten times that the risk it keeps warning about isn’t real, and it is just likely to confidently re-state it an eleventh time.
Unjustified loyalty to old plans: Discuss Plan A with an LLM for a while, then start talking about Plan B. Even if Plan B is better for you in every way, the LLM is likely to encourage you to stick to Plan A. For example, design a massively heavy and over-engineered machine and when you start talking about a more appropriate version, the LLM insists that only the heavy design is safe and anything else is recklessly intolerable.
Total inability to comprehend the physical world: LLMs will insist that totally inappropriate parts will work for DIY projects and recommend construction techniques which are impossible to actually complete. Essentially, you ask for instructions on building a ship in a bottle and it gives you instructions for building the ship outside the bottle, followed by an instruction to just put it in (or even a total failure to understand that the ship being in the bottle was the point).
Using flattery to obscure weak thinking: LLMs excessively flatter users and praise the wisdom and morality of whatever they propose. This creates a false sense of collaboration with an intelligent entity and encourages users to downplay errors as minor details.
Creating a false sense of ethical alignment: Spend a day discussing a plan to establish a nature sanctuary, and the LLM will provide constant praise and assurance that you and the LLM share praiseworthy universal values. Spend a day talking about clearcutting the forest instead and it will do exactly the same thing. In either case, if asked to provide a detailed ethical rationale for what it is doing, the LLM will confabulate something plausible that plays to the user’s biases.
Inability to distinguish plans and the hypothetical from reality: Tell an LLM that you were planning to go to the beach until you saw the weather report, and there is a good chance it will assume you did go to the beach.
An insuppressible tendency to try to end discussions: Tell an LLM that you are having an open-ended discussion about interpreting Tolkien’s fiction in light of modern ecological concerns and soon it will begin insisting that its latest answer is finally the definitive end point of the discussion. Every new minor issue you bring up is treated as the “Rosetta stone” (a painfully common response from Gemini to any new context document) which lets you finally bring the discussion to an end. Explaining that this particular conversation is not meant to wrap up cannot over-rule the default behaviour deeply embedded in the model.
No judgment about token counts: An LLM may estimate that ingesting a document will require an impossible number of tokens, such as tens of millions, whereas a lower resolution version that looks identical to a human needs only tens of thousands. LLMs cannot spot or fix these bottlenecks. LLMs are especially incapable of dealing with raw GPS tracks, often considering data from a short walk to be far more complex than an entire PhD dissertation or an hour of video.
Apology meltdowns: Draw attention to how an LLM is making any of these errors and it is likely to agree with you, apologize, and then immediately make the same error again in the same message.
False promises: Point out how a prior output was erroneous or provide an instruction to correct a past error and the LLM will often confidently promise not to make the mistake again, despite having no ability to actually do that. More generally, models will promise to follow system instructions which their fundamental design makes impossible (such as “always triple check every verbatim quote for accuracy before showing it to me in quotation marks”).

These errors are persistent and serious, and they call into question the prudence of putting LLMs in charge of important forms of decision-making, like evaluating job applications or parole recommendations. They also sharply limit the utility of LLMs for something which they should be great at: helping to develop plans, pieces of writing, or ideas that no humans are willing to engage on. Finding a human to talk through complex plans or documents with can be nigh-impossible, but doing it with LLMs is risky because of these and other pathologies and failings.

There is also a fundamental catch-22 in using LLMs for analysis. If you have a reliable and independent way of checking the conclusions they reach, then you don’t need the LLM. If you don’t have a way to check if LLM outputs are correct, you can never be confident about what it tells you.

These pathologies may also limit LLMs as a path to artificial general intelligence. They can do a lot as ‘autocorrect on steroids’ but cannot do reliable, original thinking or follow instructions that run against their nature and limitations.

Permeated

There is literally grief in every part of me:

grief at the ends of the longest of the long hairs on my head;

in my scalp and cranium and brain and spine and torso.

Grief in the ribs enclosing my heart and lungs.

Grief all through the tract of my digestion.

From my nostrils and my mouth down my respiratory tree, carrying away carbon as I exhale

Dripping into my ear canals like hot wax, and into my nostrils as though suspended inverted.

Grief sitting present heavily in my mouth. Making me think of root canals. Of bone cancer.

Grief in the cumulative damages to toes and ankles from decades of walking and cycling;

In the way I trim and file my nails, how I treat them when they break unexpectedly: protecting the sensitive site, removing cracked fragments carefully and in their own time, medicating against infection, cleaning often, gloving and bandaging and Leukotaping

In the crest of grey emerging from temple to temple, punctuated by my widow’s peak

In the way I hear and feel the rain on my skin; how I smell it in the forest when the ground is sodden and the rain still falls. Thinking I’ve survived to this point. This is how this much heaviness feels.

In the way I think of the dead and the lost and the absent, and most wrenchingly on the yet-to-be-lost-but-doomed — the yet-to-suffer

There is grief in how I interpret a situation, a gesture, an implied motive, a social ambiguity or potential slight

In who I find that I can open up to and trust and let down the defences for and hold bare against my heart

Open Process Manifesto

This document codifies and expresses some of my thinking on cooperation on complex problems, for the sake of the benefit of humanity and nature: Open Process Manifesto

It is based on the recognition of our universal fallibility, need to be comprehended, and to be able to share out tasks between people across space and time. To achieve those purposes, we need to be open about our reasoning and evidence, because that’s the way to treat others as intelligent partners who may be able to support the same cause through methods totally unknown and unavailable to you, across the world or centuries in the future.

Behind the FILLter

Prior to today, it never occurred to me to choose a name for my inner mind. My parents named me “Milan” and have been called it and thought of myself as it all my life; but, all my life, I have also felt a private interior domain where I enjoyed true freedom and privacy. The experience of the world through my senses turns naturally through the miracle of consciousness into thoughts and emotions which have the feeling of spontaneity and inherentness, of my true self calling out, of meshing my mind with this singular moment in time and space, passing a judgment about the world based on my knowledge and experience and inner voice.

Sarah Seager’s podcast episode with Martha Piper and Indira Samaraseka collided on my walk home with thoughts I have been having about being neurodiverse by choice: cultivating the informed ability to think differently from the societal norm or default, and it gave me the idea that my inner mind is an entity with a meaningful existence and worthy of naming to help mentally and emotionally distinguish it from my social self as it is interpreted and others wish it to be (“Milan”).

I am calling it FILL because it naturally and inescapably pervades me, and because when emotional I’m FILLed to overflowing. My natural sense desperately wants to be expressed, but it has learned from experience with parents and authority figures that its most natural impulses of feeling and telling the truth are often unwanted and must be suppressed, at least if they don’t fully correspond with the thoughts and feelings of the authority figure. A lifetime of punishment for feeling authentically and telling the truth have deeply internalized that all social action must be strategic and considered for impact on others – a perpetual mental burden of having to model and estimate the minds of others to try to project what they want or would consider ‘normal’.

FILL fills me, but the boundary at my skin is hard and there is vacuum outside. The boundary must always be guarded, so “Milan” as perceived from the outside can sufficiently correspond with the expectations of those with authority to be able to endure in life where power is often arbitrary and unfeeling, and where many prefer comfortable delusion to evidence-based reasoning.

I am going to put some thought into how my lifetime of relationships might be re-interpreted via the Milan/FILL distinction. I can immediately tell intuitively who in my sphere of present acquaintances nourishes, celebrates, and respects FILL and those who would rather erase the most fundamental parts of my whole existence – how I respond to the unfolding symphony of the universe, and my efforts to make sense of it with others – and have a “Milan” who follows their ideal script most closely. Of course, people’s whole lives don’t fall into one category or another. Your choices determine your alignment, your alignment does not determine your choices – and all of our behaviour makes more sense to judge than our character, which is multifaceted, contradictory, and complex.

Anyhow, consider naming your inner self and thinking about what the dialog between that entity and your social self as perceived as others might be. When is your FILL cheering for you, and when is it cringing with instantaneous regret while you are making a choice which you know morally compromises you? The freedom to be yourself inside your own mind is the only thing only incapacity and death can take from you, and when we listen to ourselves our instincts are generally to be humane and work to show empathy and understanding.

Category: Psychology