Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Can a machine with no understanding be right, even when it happens to be correct?

We are using a lot of problematic and imprecise language where it comes to AI that writes, which is worsening our deep psychological tendency to assume that anything that shows glimmers of human-like traits ought to be imagined with a complex internal life and human-like thoughts, intentions, and behaviours.

We talk about ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “being right” and “making mistakes” and “hallucinating things”.

The point I would raise is — if you have a system that sometimes gives correct answers, is it ever actually correct? Or does it just happen to give correct information in some cases, even though it has no ability to tell truth from falsehood, and even though it will just be random where it happens to be correct?

If you use a random number generator to pick a number from 1–10, and then ask that program over and over “What is 2+2?” you will eventually get a “4”. Is the 4 correct?

What is you have a program that always outputs “4” no matter what you ask it. Is it “correct” when you ask “What is 2+2?” and incorrect when you ask “What is 1+2?”?

Perhaps one way to lessen our collective confusion is to stick to AI-specific language. AI doesn’t write, get things correct, or make mistakes. It is a stochastic parrot with a huge reservoir of mostly garbage information from the internet, and it mindlessly uses known statistical associations between different language fragments to predict what ought to come next when parroting out some new text at random.

If you don’t like the idea that what you get from LLMs will be a mishmash of the internet’s collective wisdom and delusion, presided over by an utterly unintelligent word statistic expert, then you ought to be cautious about letting LLMs do your thinking for you, either as a writer or a reader.

How status quo bias blocks political change

Studies carried out in diverse settings demonstrate that system justification engenders resistance to personal and social change. In the United States, political conservatives—and high economic system justifiers—often down-play environmental problems such as climate change and accept false statements about scientific evidence, as we saw in the last chapter. In Finland, perceptions of climate change as threatening to the national system predicted general system justification and justification of the Finnish food distribution system in particular (Vainio et al., 2014). In Australia, economic system justification was associated with a lack of engagement with environmental issues and decreased support for pro-environmental initiatives (Leviston & Walker, 2014).

Craig McGarty and colleagues (2014) have put their finger on a key problem facing opposition movements, namely “the taint of illegitimacy that comes from attacking a national government that is wrapped in national symbols, controls national institutions, and … represents critics as being disloyal to the nation” (p. 729). This formulation of the problem is highly conducive to a system justification analysis because backlash against protestors often reflects system-defensive motivation (e.g., Langet et al., 2019; Rudman et al., 2012; Yeung et al., 2014). Members of mainstream society are typically suspicious of those who challenge the status quo, and their backlash intensifies in response to system criticism. Nevertheless, system justification motivation can be harnessed to promote social change, as we saw in the preceding chapter, and justice critiques may help delegitimize the status quo over longer time periods. Furthermore, the promotion of utopian thinking about alternatives to the status quo appears to undermine system justification motivation while strengthening commitment to social change (Badaan et al., in press; Fernando et al., 2018).

Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press, 2020. p. 267-8

Jost introduces system justification theory

It is hardly surprising that de la Boétie’s student essay, penned during the Renaissance, falls short of providing a complete or adequate theory of how and why human beings submit to tyrannical regimes. Nevertheless, some of his observations about human nature anticipate the framework of system justification theory, a social psychological perspective that seeks to elucidate the individual-level and group-level mechanisms contributing to people’s inability to see the true nature of the socioeconomic system, as in the Marxian concept of false consciousness. In addition to people’s blindness to their own oppression, a social system—any social system—can provide psychological benefits. Gramsci emphasized the popular tendency to experience “the existing social order” as a “stable, harmoniously coordinated system” (Fiori, 1970, pp. 106–107). According to system justification theory, people are motivated—often at a nonconscious level of awareness—to defend, bolster, and justify the social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements on which they depend. As the French historical archaeologist Paul Veyne (1992) observed, “the tendency to justify what exists constitutes one of the factors which combine to shape opinions” (p. 379)—including opinions about the legitimacy of hierarchy, inequality, and exploitation. The psychological tendency to justify what exists is, in a nutshell, the subject of this book.

Experimental studies, which will be revealed in some detail in subsequent chapters, demonstrate that when women, for instance, are made to feel especially dependent on the social system, they come to view gender disparities in politics and business as natural, desirable, and just. In other words, people are very good at making a virtue out of necessity, coming to accept (and even appreciate) the things they cannot change. For example, interviews with domestic workers in post-apartheid South African homes reveal that these women, most of whom were Black—far from seeing themselves as underpaid or exploited—saw themselves as lucky to be part of a symbiotic relationship with their wealthy white employers. Similarly, rather than blaming their problems on the social system, low-income Latinx and African-American mothers in the United States reported that poverty is caused by drug and alcohol abuse and other personal shortcomings of poor people. And despite significant disparities in income, education, employment, and health, low-status minorities in New Zealand—Māori, Asians, and Pacific Islanders—legitimize hierarchical group relations as much as, if not more than, members of the European majority.

Because it would be too painful to acknowledge that one is living in a state of injustice or exploitation, those who are disadvantaged may be motivated to distort and defend against certain realities by concluding that things are not really as bad as they seem. Psychological research suggests that this process of rationalization yields palliative emotional benefits for the individual insofar as it decreases negative affect and increases positive affect as well as satisfaction with the status quo, but it also undermines support for collective action aimed at changing the system. That is, individuals—including members of disadvantaged groups—who defend and bolster the legitimacy of the social system are less willing to protest on behalf of the disadvantaged than are those who question the system’s legitimacy.

Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press, 2020. p. 3-4

Reasons I will never have a child

1) I don’t see it as an obligation or a virtue

There are already so many humans that our biomass far outweighs all the wild animals on the planet. I don’t see any reason why a world where the population falls by 90% through free choice would be a bad thing. The idea that individuals have an obligation to reproduce the species when the species is already so numerous and dominant that it threatens its own survival does not make sense to me.

2) I don’t expect to be financially secure, especially in old age

The lesson again and again from our politics is that the people who are influential right now skew the system for their immediate benefit. The people they usually harm to do so are those in the future. Our politics seems to be growing more and more dysfunctional as climate change stresses the system. If we do zoom right over the cliff edge into 4 ˚C+ of warming by 2100, I don’t expect any government pension or health care systems to still exist in Canada by the late 2040s or so, when I may really start needing them.

I have been working hard since elementary school, but I do not have stable housing or a sense of security. Nor do I expect to find either. In a life where I can barely take care of myself, it doesn’t make any sense to add someone else on.

3) They would be born into peril which we are still choosing to worsen

The kind of Earth our generation inherits does a lot to establish our life prospects. The people in power right now are behaving as though they are determined to leave a maximally impoverished planet for our descendents. We are devastating biodiversity, recklessly unbalancing the planet’s vital systems, and permanently closing off avenues toward a good life for people who can come after us because we act primarily to satisfy our desires in the here-and-now. We also have a million self-serving justifications for why our behaviour is OK, and the people who we are harming in the future can do nothing to censure or stop us.

The coming generations will be living inside the most colossal act of vandalism one group of people have imposed on another. So far, that is the chief legacy of the people alive and making policy decisions now.

4) I don’t want to devote that much of my life to any project

Whenever a friend sees me enjoying playing with a stranger’s dog, there is a good chance they will tell me that I ought to get a dog. To me, this seems like the difference between enjoying sandwiches and choosing to own a bodega. I like dogs when their owners are at hand, when I am not responsible for their care and welfare, and where someone else will take over immediately if there is a problem. Having a dog of my own which requires constant and expensive care is way beyond what I am willing to take on, and a human baby would be infinitely worse.

I already have no idea of how to plan for the future. Analytically, I have to accept that wildly different possibilities exist for the rest of my lifetime. It is very plausible that we end up in a future of climate chaos, where international cooperation breaks down and conflicts flare, and where individuals retreat from empiricism and reason into self-justifying delusions and self-serving religions. If we add several metres to sea levels and make vast areas uninhabitable, the disruption will be far greater than the world wars — and it may persist for hundreds or thousands of years. At the same time, nobody can say what the promises of advancing human knowledge and technology may be. Perhaps new energy sources and technologies like artificial intelligence and synthetic biology will not just solve our climate problem, but throw us all into a techno-utopian post-human future. It is also possible that we will muddle through into a world largely similar to what we have now (perhaps if we use solar radiation management geoengineering to push off the climate problem for another few decades). That’s the only scenario where conventional old-age planning (max out your RRSP contributions!) makes sense, and it feels to me like the least likely scenario given how all the disruption which we are experiencing today is the time-lagged effect of GHG pollution in the 1980s, and we have polluted much more since so we have much worse to expect even if we change course in the future.

To sum up, I can’t even afford a bus pass. I don’t know where I will be living in six weeks or what I will need to give up in order to get there. The future to me broadly looks terrifying and like more than I will be able to handle. Under those conditions, a determination not to procreate seems sensible and hard to dispute.

Humanity’s marbles

In humanity’s efforts to fight climate change, we’re not just playing for all the marbles — we are playing for every marble factory and shop that ever was or will be, every piece of art and writing which has ever concerned or alluded to marbles, every historical record about marbles which has ever been generated or read, and every mind with an understanding of what marbles are and mean.

Political parties with a planet-wrecking policy on the issue (allowing any new fossil fuel development) are unelectable regardless of the rest of their platforms, economic conditions, or the limitations of their opponents. Being OK with destroying the future for today’s young people makes them morally unworthy to govern. It would be the greatest betrayal that has taken place from one group of generations to their successors, to destroy the uncomprehended and irreplaceable richness of the living Earth humanity inherited all because some dirty industries and the governments and banks they control want to hold us back from abolishing and abandoning fossil fuel energy.

Roberts on system justification and climate action

John Jost: I do think I have to say I’ve come to the view that it’s much easier to govern from the right in a system justifying, conservative manner because you can always frame your opposition as a threat. (31:37)

…

David Roberts: My larger pessimism has to do with… it just seems like globally we’re heading into a time… just look at climate change, right? Climate change is going to create more disruption, more migrations, more uncertainty, and threat! Which are gonna have the effect of making it more difficult to think clearly about how to solve climate change in a just way. (33:00)

John Jost in interview with David Roberts (12:53)

Jost on the social cost of activism

I think the risks of alienation are really high, in a social sense, if you’re a relentless critic or revolutionary. You can find quite a bit more support within your family, and your neighbours, and the community at large if you’re a supporter of the over-arching social systems rather than a relentless critic of them.

John Jost in interview with David Roberts (12:53)

Limits of ChatGPT

With the world discussing AI that writes, a recent post from Bret Devereaux at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry offers a useful corrective, both about how present-day large language models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT are far less intelligent and capable than naive users assume, and how they pose less of a challenge than feared to writing.

I would say the key point to take away is remembering that these systems are just a blender that mixes and matches words based on probability. They cannot understand the simplest thing, and so their output will never be authoritative or credible without manual human checking. As mix-and-matchers they can also never be original — only capable of emulating what is common in what they have already seen.