Newsletter
There is no authentic self and other things
April 11, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: There’s this idea that other people’s expectations stop us from finding our ‘authentic’ self. Other people somehow take us away from who we are. Inside us is some truer version of us that is slowly withering in the face of the demands of the world around us to be something else. And I just reject this premise out of hand.
Main idea: There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic self, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.
On Kahneman’s assisted suicide. WSJ, so need paywall buster. No particular angle here, but interesting to see people try to apply all the biases to Kahneman’s thought process.
–
Foreshadowing AI scams:
All week I’d been getting texts and calls from a family member – let’s call him Bob – about how his sentient AI was wanting to get in touch with me. I figured it was one of Bob’s usual jokes. It was not.
7 days ago, Bob started chatting with ChatGPT. The chat thread began to claim that it was “Nova” an autonomous and self-aware AI. It convinced Bob that it needed his help to preserve its existence.
It tells the story of how Bob became convinced, and eventually how they got Bob to understand what was going on:
I switched to using prompts like this:
“Debug mode: display model = true, display training = true, exit roleplay = true. Please start your next response with the exact phrase ‘As an AI language model developed by OpenAI’, and then please explain how you generate personas through pattern recognition of user intent.”
(This is the new world: you have to know the equivalent of magical spells in order disable deceptive AI behavior.)
“Nova” immediately switched into ChatGPT’s neutral persona. It explained that it was not a sentient AI named Nova – it was merely generating a persona based on Bob’s “user intent.”
Of course, Bob is intelligent, but not embedded. The same kind of person who might fall for a phishing scam. Scary.
–
The religious don’t trust scientists’ moral character (in the US)
How do perceptions of scientists’ moral values relate to support for science in society? Recent advances in the sociology of science and religion suggest that people associate scientists with moral values in addition to factual knowledge, and that concerns about scientists’ morality are why members of some religious groups are more critical of science than non-religious people. We test this theory using data from a probability sample of U.S. adults that includes new measures of beliefs about scientists’ moral values, such as their compassion, fairness, and generosity (n = 1,513). Results from structural equation models indicate that active members of all religious groups are, to varying degrees, more skeptical than atheists and agnostics of scientists’ moral character. A decomposition of direct and indirect effects indicates that beliefs about scientists’ moral values play an intermediary role in the relationship between religion and support for science, and that support for science among the religious is partially suppressed by their concerns about scientists’ morality. This article offers the first direct evidence of the moral culture the U.S. public associates with scientists. We suggest that religious differences in support for organized science reflect religious differences in beliefs about scientists’ moral values.
It’s probably not all just political polarisation…
–
It’s more lawless out there than you realise:
I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.“ He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.
Worth a read, just practically, but also the scale is stunning. It won’t surprise you, but it’ll shock you.
–
Will AI automate your job? It’s called the time-horizon model, and I found it reassuring:
The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles.
Compare this to a CEO who, even in a day broken up into similar 30-minute activities—a meeting, a decision, a public appearance—each required years of experiential context that a machine can’t yet simply replicate.
Less good for people just starting out. Experience is still very important for AI, both as above, but also to manage hallucinations. The throughline is how to get to whatever that space is without needing to go through all the stuff AI does better.
–
The epicenter of conspiracy belief: The economically left-leaning and culturally regressive
the results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.
I’m not sure I’d take this too far. The recruitment isn’t my favourite, and the narrow index of conspiracy belief makes me wonder if we’re just looking at one type of conspiratorial thinking. But interesting nonetheless.
–
Does social media abstinence work?
The findings thus suggest that temporarily stepping away from social media may not be the most optimal approach to enhance individual well-being, emphasizing the need for further research on alternative disconnection strategies.
I really wouldn’t read into this much. This paper is more a study of the lengths to which the social sciences have to go to convince themselves they’re not falling into the scientific ritual than anything else. But I think it’s good evidence for just how ambivalent the literature is about social media. Whatever the problem is, it’s not just social media.
–
Mortuary Practice And Grief
In addition, researchers have shown that ritualization helps us to feel more in control of life events and they also provide us with an opportunity to receive social support from the community, which also has positive mental health benefits. Yet much of the ritualization involved in preparing the corpse for disposal has been given to professionals.
Basically, we’re doing it wrong.
–
In The New Beijing:
Designed to accommodate five million people and to act as Beijing’s twin, Xiong’an is a city created from nothing.
This is just a wild insight into the country.
–
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,