Simple doesn't mean easy
Life is not hard to understand. But weak people don't want to do the work
The current spate of people screwing up their lives, destroying their families and even committing suicide thanks to AI psychosis is (if you care) a somewhat interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective.
This post by Lauren explains it rather well.
My personal reaction to people who have AI psychosis is pretty much similar to my reaction regarding the vast majority of humans on this planet, i.e. what a bunch of fucking idiots.
At an objective level I simply cannot see it any different than idiots, doing idiot things, in idiot ways, for idiot reasons. I hope you are starting to get the sense of how I feel about it objectively.
At a human level, of course, it’s fucking tragic. But then so are most human lives when you see them from my perspective.1
But what is to be done?
Well, none of that AI psychosis can happen to someone who at the very least either:
Understands how AI functions and why (beyond most people but I did write about it thanks to a guy who did the hard work of explaining it rather well first)
Actually, really, KNOW YOURSELF.
That’s it. And if you have both, you’re golden.
Now, it needs to be said that the knowing yourself part must absolutely be rooted in reality, not your fever dreams of what a cool guy you are. That way lies AI psychosis and tragedy even without AI, oh my so not special unicorn.
Knowing yourself means you know exactly how you would react to shit you are not prepared for. It means that even in the heat of the fear and the alarm,2 if you survive, when you look back, you know you couldn’t, and wouldn’t, have done anything different.
That means facing who you really are, choosing who you really want to be, then becoming it. It’s a conscious, constant, never-ending process of perennially checking and testing yourself.
Of course, I wrote about it at length in my book on Systema, and I discuss it in various ways in Caveman Theory too, but if you just do that —know yourself— then you don’t need to read anything else I write on it, really.
Live your life. Be. Do. And win or die trying.
That’s all there is to life, really, and in case you don’t know, “winning” has very little to do with “worldly success”. It can have something to do with it, but marginally at best.
So that is all you need to do, in order to not hang yourself from your doorknob after a one-on-one with ChatGTP: Know yourself.
You’re welcome.
Now, since I saved your life, and my posts are all free for all anyway, be a dear and buy a yearly sponsorship will ya? Or at least send me a Herradura Tequila bottle.
Obligatory (and pointless) note: No, it’s not because I am “arrogant” it’s because I am not falsely humble (it’s not a virtue to be falsely humble). I am objectively 55% smarter than the average human, which means that the difference in IQ between the average person and an actually mentally handicapped person, previously known as Morons (IQ between 51 and 70) is, at its extreme, slightly less than between me and the average human. No, I don’t care this makes you feel “bad” or that *I* am a bad, bad, arrogant, man. You know why I don’t care? For the same reason you don’t care if a chimp at the zoo really thinks badly of you. I know, I know, I should write the follow up to “How to make friends and influence people.” (Except you’re chimps, see…heh. Hey, I gotta amuse myself here.)
From one of my two favourite songs, Brothers in Arms, by Dire Straits.
They want to chose the easy hard instead of the rewarding hard. Decades of tech dependency & instant gratification for convenience has decreased peoples ability to accept any kind of discipline or sacrifice. I call out people for associating sacrifice with a net loss. Sacrifice is a net gain of love. Period. That is the way it needs to be looked at. The same way we discipline to correct out of love we also sacrifice out of love. The concern is that most people these days do not want to be accountable or responsible for themselves let alone others. They are completely comfortable taking shortcuts instead of focusing on the long lasting results.