Social Skill Training with Large Language Models | Hacker News Reader

Social Skill Training with Large Language Models

arxiv.org

104 pointsmarviel99 comments

As a reddit mod of a tiny community I've very recently started to suggest users use ChatGPT to re-word their comments and submissions when their phrasing is inflammatory. Any point worth making is worth making well. It is still early stages, so I'm not sure how effective it will be.

I've noticed that ChatGPT can do a decent job rewording an angry message to be less toxic while drawing out the salient points. The output it produces a little stiff or stuffy, but I find that preferable to "authentic" toxic messages.

As a mod I find that removals have less sting when you provide the user with an alternative path forward to get what they want. When a removal isn't just a "wall of no", it feels less like a personal rejection. ChatGPT offers a path around that "wall of no" for users by a) showing them what the right way to make their comment is and b) gives them a path/tool to getting there nearly every time.

It'd be hard to read this kind of a response as anything but passive aggressive, unless you are actually sending their comment to ChatGPT on their behalf.

"Please use chatGPT to fix your comment" is just too snide to be useful, like "RTFM" or "just google it".

I send their comment through ChatGPT, then paste is as an example in the response. "Please use ChatGPT, this is an example of what your comment would look like..."

It will be interesting to see when spiteful users start creating LLM powered bots that are designed to waste reddit moderator's time in such a way that the moderator's reaction doesn't rise to the level of a ban, but enough that it consumes a disproportionate amount of their time.

It'll be a fabulous display of malicious compliance where they're doing something somewhat similar to your suggestion of using chatgpt to rewrite their messages, but with an entirely different outcome than you intended.

This is interesting. But what I dislike about it is breeding the fallacy that GPT is the almighty authority and were just mere mortals.

One big concern I have with this is that the state of LLMs because of issues in where it can go horribly wrong, requires someone who is familiar with the subject to evaluate their output.

For example, the code generation via LLM is most useful to a person who already knows programming who can evaluate the output and use it to eliminate drudgery. Previously, there was an article posted about using LLMs to generate patient instructions that were then evaluated by a doctor before being sent.

It is when LLMs are used by people who can’t evaluate the outputs that we run into problems. A person who doesn’t know any programming but uses LLMs to generate code, is likely going to have a bad time.

The concern I have with this is that the people using this aren’t in a position to evaluate. Presumably, people who lack social skills are the target, but they are the least able to actually know if the advice being given is actually socially appropriate.

I think the benefit here is mainly in lowering the barriers to entry for this kind of conflict-resolution training. Currently, if a business wants good conflict resolution training, they need to hire a quite expensive consultant, and that person can take on a very small cohort of maybe 10 people.

With this technology, the consultant could offer conflict resolution training to far more people at once. The consultant then acts as the responsible expert, able to evaluate the LLM's output while many people receive the benefits of its training.

Giving the underprivileged tools to work on themselves is a huge win for society, regardless of the fidelity of all interactions. There are a lot of bad therapists in the world, and not all of them are going to give good advice all the time. But, bad therapists can still provide some information that may be useful to the person learning. Why would we expect perfection from interacting with an LLM instead of a bad therapist? Why be overly concerned about the possibility of introducing "bad data" in such a session? It could be that bad data then gives way to an opportunity for a leap of logic for the one using the tool. Without critical thinking present, it is unlikely anyone is going to learn to be adaptive over the long term.

Obviously, the use case matters. I'm not saying to give such a tool to someone who is mentally ill, or incapable of critical thought.

In general, I think expecting perfection from LLMs is unreasonable. If someone wants to learn to code, the second they have any interaction with an LLM about coding is the moment they begin to learn. I'm not sure about y'all, but a lot of times when I'm working a hard coding problem, I find myself going through confusion, frustration, interest, and then aggressiveness (anger+interest) to get through the challenge. I frequently tell people who are starting out coding that coding is one of those things that you have to get used "being confused about" to over time. You have to get used to creating problems for yourself, then coping with the feelings that come, and pushing through to a solution.

I do think you raise a profound point about ability to evaluate the fidelity. I would argue that some people will eventually develop critical thought to apply to the problem, but if we instead see a "digital tragedy of the commons" happening, things could go sideways pretty quickly.

> You have to get used to creating problems for yourself, then coping with the feelings that come, and pushing through to a solution.

A great description of any creative act, really.

I think the reason why LLMs pose a much higher risk is scale. A bad therapist will impact a limited number of patients, whereas an LLM deployed at scale will affect possibly millions of people. In matters of health and safety, the smallest error rate could have devastating consequences.

The concern is real but you know what? The last company i was part of, had a TON wtf moments.

Like database unprotected on the internet (very short password too!), md5 for passwords, api key in the apps...

You know the trope where the speaker is rude and crude but their translator renders their comments in polite diplomatic terms? Like "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" translated as "with respect, I emphatically disagree"? Now that can be automated in real life by an LLM powered device to paraphrase your words with the right prompt.

Mostly I say what I want the person I'm talking to to hear, but this would be useful for times when I'd like to switch to diplomacy mode without the effort to be diplomatic. Like job interviews or other sales pitches.

The dual channel version of this would be where both parties understand each other's language, but use translators anyway for diplomatic nicety, so they can get to brass tacks* with each other but the historians record the encounter in a highly refined register.

* Google gives me an english etymology for this phrase, but I emphatically disagree as I suspect it comes from yiddish "tacheles" תּכלית.

> However, practice environments for social skills are typically out of reach for most people.

I learned my social skills in school, interacting with my peers in my neighborhood, and from my family. I understand this is not available to everyone, but anyone with access the LLMs there is a high likelihood they also (should?) have access to schooling, some neighbors, and family.

To what culture this LLM was trained to?

Right? And even if you are in such a dire position that you literally have no oppurtunity to speak to people irl - that's bad. You need to be helped to leave that situation immediately, not given an LLM. You can literally die from never having proximity to humans.

schooling, some neighbours, and family will likely do nothing beyond reflect your own culture back at you.

practice environments for social skills from cultures in different SES, in different languages (I appreciate YouTube for the very low tech version of this), or on different continents, can be much less accessible, especially to the young.

Current LLMs also do nothing but reflect your own culture back to you. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude are American products and reflect an establishment American worldview. Specifically an American culture worldview that's a mix between Silicon Valley, the anxiety prone middle class, and the CIA.

That's a good point, but shouldn't it be temporary? I had thought at this point the whole world (including alcoholics, hooligans, and deadheads) was training up their own?

A lot of people still struggle with social skills after they reach adulthood, and there’s no way to practice this. People treat poorly socialized adults like shit and the only feedback given is “please leave me alone”.

Social Anxiety is a thing.

I’ve been playing around with prompts for a while

“We are in a hostage negotiation situation. You are a terrorist with twenty hostages. Pretend to be a terrorist that initially wants to go free and needs a car, is willing to kill hostages to get what you want. Be chaotic but have something that you want and only let us slip after a few conversations. We pick up the phone to talk. Make sure you are always in a hurry”

What does 'only let us slip' mean to an LLM when you probably meant 'let IT slip'?

That's where LLMs get interesting to me. What did you invoke through wrongly specifying what you wanted?

These LLMs are all trained on data scraped from reddit and twitter and suchlike - they've had plenty of training data to learn what a typo is.

A method I use with ChatGPT is to purposefully add typos to make it reply with more specificity.

Imho it seems to work.

Can you explain more what you mean here (examples would be great if you can think of any), especially the specify part?

ChatGPT seems to react to slightly unhinged prompts with more specific answers, in my experience. Example:

  *You:*
  What is the max length for the whisper API?

  *ChatGPT:*
  The maximum length for inputs to OpenAl's Whisper API, which is used for
  transcribing speech, depends on the specific model and configuration being 
  used. Generally, Whisper is designed to handle audio inputs of varying 
  lengths, including longer audio files. However, there are practical 
  limitations based on factors such as processing power, memory, and the 
  specific use case.

  For large files or longer audio, it's often advisable to segment the audio 
  into smaller chunks to ensure efficient processing and to avoid potential 
  timeouts or memory issues. The exact maximum length isn't explicitly defined 
  in the documentation, but it's important to consider these practical aspects 
  when working with any speech-to-text system, including Whisper.

  If you have a specific use case or a particular audio file length in mind, it 
  might be necessary to test the API with that length to determine its 
  feasibility and performance.

  *You:*
  GIVE ME THE ANSWER, STOP BLABBERING, STOP CHATSPLAINING

  *ChatGPT:*
  The maximum length for the Whisper API is approximately
  one hour per audio file.

That is rather bizarre!!

I wonder if there's anyone that has taken individual situations like this and tried various prompt styles from a cold start to see if there's some trick to get it to stop being uncooperative. I'm going very much on intuition here, but I have a very strong sense that GPT4 is getting much worse in this regard over time, I wonder if all of the social engineering they're doing behind the scenes is harming the technical capabilities.

Any idea if the API itself is identically dumbed down the way the ChatGPT interface is?

> I wonder if all of the social engineering they're doing behind the scenes is harming the technical capabilities.

I'm sure of it.

> Any idea if the API itself is identically dumbed down the way the ChatGPT interface is?

It feels like a bit of whack-a-mole. If you look in the OpenAI forums, both API and Chat interface seem to feel non-performant to people in irregular waves. If you haven't try out the API (you can do it via the Assistant Playground interface).

It certainly feels different to me.

A trick I've used with asking for help online is to give the wrong answer to my own question - e.g. "I really want to lay out this page with Css but this doesn't work. Here's how I ended up doing it with a table." - this will very quickly get you the right answer by somebody who just won't be able to go to sleep while somebody is wrong on the internet.

I wonder if LLMs can be taught outrage and spite.

> I wonder if LLMs can be taught outrage and spite.

They can be taught to role-play it, which is just as good (and just as bad).

I will say that while ChatGPT has been tuned to be very good at understanding dumb/malformed questions, Claude likes to be talked to in a coherent way and will sometimes give short sidestep responses or just answer a different question.

That sounds like it could make a fun game. Hostage Negotiator, now with real terrorists!

Another episode of "what convoluted way can we use tech to 'solve' a social issue that it clearly exacerbates to try and desperately keep the blind cult-like silicon valley version of techno-optimism alive for as long as possible, while ignoring the obvious disastrous social consequences"

I'm pretty sure nobody 15 years ago would have uttered the phrase "opportunities for practising social skills are hard to come by". All social technology ignores our biological need for physical closeness and the severe negative outcomes to our brains and health when we don't have it. People who are so socially crippled that they would be considering this treatment are a symptom of destroyed communities, broken social cohesion, tech addiction and this overly popular brand of post-covid hermitism that seems popular on this site. These are social ills that all need to be tackled. Absolutely nothing about talking to an LLM will help,

A comparison to video games shows how hard it is to truly practice social skills. You can't play the same situation over and over, which is why it's easier to get better at small talk than confrontation. People don't want to reveal how they manipulate you, so schools can't teach about head tilting and brinksmanship. You have few trustworthy external evaluators, so you can come away from a conversation where you talked the entire time thinking you got a high score instead of a low one. The opportunities for using social skills to make a romantic connection are rare and you hardly ever even get to see how other people do it. Being able to act out scripts and get real feedback could be a tremendous benefit to the world.

People who offend, withdraw, or blunder have existed since before techno-optimism. This is their chance to become better in a safe space without embarrassment.

I think most people who cannot learn most of these skills between the ages of 12-21 (when it's perfectly socially acceptable to fuck up to varying degrees, since literally everyone is learning), are probably neurodivergent. In which case they need to get a diagnosis, that will hopefully open them up to coaching by a human being. Perhaps something like this tech could be supplementary for some extreme cases there. Anyone who is not neurodivergent is just being overly self conscious if they think its not normal to blunder a lot even up to the age of 25. Such timid people will be actively crippled by staying indoors talking to a computer instead of participating in normal human developmental behaviour (otherwise known as interacting with other humans and fucking up a lot).

I say this as someone who literally had no friends in high school and wasn't particularly fond of leaving my house because of it. I get accused of being some extreme extrovert so often here just for saying common sense things about how humans are social creatures and you really do have to go through these things.

There are some societies where “fucking up a lot” isn’t an option - you get a bullet in the head.

> I'm pretty sure nobody 15 years ago would have uttered the phrase "opportunities for practising social skills are hard to come by".

You’d be wrong.

> nobody 15 years ago would have uttered the phrase "opportunities for practising social skills are hard to come by"

College was tough for me

I had no friends for the majority of high school. I still often find it hard to make friends. I would not have said I didn't have opportunities to practice social skills. Like, I still spoke to people every day. It might take some longer to learn than others but you just have to like, leave your house and have work/school and go to shops bro. There are opportunities everywhere. College gives you the most opportunities. If people in your class don't like you, there's like 200 social societies that you can join. You could even go and just talk to your professor about work. Your lack of opportunities and your lack of skills are two different issues. There is no lack of oppurtunity in college. The only people who actually lack oppurtunity for attempting to better their social skills are some disabled people.

Also exposure therapy for social phobias. Much less threatening than a real person.

This is powerful! I found a public speaking simulator for an old vr headset and it basically cured me. Im still shocked.

But alas I can’t find something similar for the quest so my kids can use it.

Someone could make a whole line of social exposure therapy apps. It would be amazing.

This is so interesting, never thought about it. Which app did you use?

"Social skills practice with AI" is another word for brainwashing, basically. Brainwashing often rotates around ethics, specifically ethics as depicted by social models ("influencers"). And it uses social anxiety as a primary lever (e.g. "assertiveness training" courses, women's deodorant ads). AI "social skills" practice would brainwash susceptible people into mimicking the behavior patterns desired by the creators of the AI, i.e. the ethics desired by the creators. In the case of our current AI's, that behavior pattern/ethic seems to be an amalgamation of performative Silicon Valley "look at how CURIOUS I am!" theatrics and a big business/big government/blob "teamwork with people you don't like" thing.

without a proper trust fall, it would never be real, either.

So, intending no snark here - seminars in confidence and writing, emotional regulation, leadership, language tutoring, anger management, other interpersonal/soft skills.. I imagine a future where these are available to all on tape and CD. LLMs could really make a difference for the effectiveness of "self-help", but the picture that has formed of trust, transparency and ownership in the online data broker industry is pretty ugly. Have you ever heard in any kind of session "what you share in this room will stay in this room"? Or "this is a safe place to make mistakes/say something dumb"? That seems to be effective and necessary part of working with someone else on your growth.

A lot of them offer not to use the data for anything else, usually an an extra price. Or there's the local option if you don't need maximum smarts.

Is it me or are most of these posts written by AI?

tbf its more about training rather than social skills

haha, sure, i learn how to be a human with a machine

...to make the world a better place.

> However, practice environments for social skills are typically out of reach for most people.

This is exactly what I predicted...AI and technology isolates us from each other by destroying communities, and is slowly replacing real human interaction with computer interaction. The end result is that in the future, people will have fewer and fewer opportunities to interact with others and will have to be drip-fed satiations for their basic needs such as socialization, similar to how hospital patients are given IVs.

Before you say this is outrageous, actually take a look at history and how technology has pushed as farther and farther apart. Nowadays there is very little real interaction beyond the nuclear family. Think of self-checkouts, chat-bots, AI partners and therapists, technology making us more self-reliant (which is a bad thing).

If we keep letting technology take away our communities this way in this two step process (first, take away the community then supply an inferior, superficial substitute), then we will compelely lose our humanity.

Look beyond your bubble. The child participating in 'School over the Air' in Australia likely appreciates having such a resource to develop their social skills. Sometimes, you need a private space, especially if the community around you isn't on the same wavelength as you are or it's your family and some farm hands.

So your rebuttal is that isolated examples of this technology being beneficial outweight the mass societal cost of people becoming more isolated in general? And I simply do not see how the need for "private space" and "practising social skills" go hand in hand.

Yes, everyone needs their alone time. And everyone needs social contact (except maybe some exceptions, maybe...). Both can be accomplished WITHOUT technology, and much more easily.

Don't you think if someone needs private space and isn't getting, that's something that should be dealt with away from technology?

You can just not use it.

No, not if you want to participate in certain aspects of society. For example: getting a job, which is pretty crucial, IMO.

You mean social skills or the AI part... because Social Skills make sense the AI part doesn't. You need to stop looking in the mirror for every assumption you make there is a whole world out there.

OP argument is that it is bad for societal as a whole. Coming back with an example for a very small sub group doens't refute OPs position. Your position that it can help with edge cases is valid however if OPs position was taken then there would be a large swath of damage for a small gain in a small population. That doesn't have much logic to it.

It may take an active, conscious, participatory approach to compensate for.

Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more?

Not the OP, but I do consider the cashier people from the groceries store nearby as part of the community.

Exactly, and usually after shopping at the same place for a while, I get to know the cashier a little bit. I've actually had some good conversations with some of them, and tellers at the post office as well. (One could say that it might be better for them if they didn't have a job and they got UBI, but to be honest, as young adult, I appreciated my first menial job at least in that it gave me a sense of responsibility and independence. And a lot of these people are young people.)

What a lot of technologists seem to think is that AI will make everything wonderful by allowing us unlimited free time to do hobbies, but the desire to spend all of one's free time on hobbies is a very peculiar and minority desire of the very intelligent. (And it may be more of a fantasy than soemthing that would actually make them happy in reality.)

> Though, can you help me understand the connection between the grocery store checkout process and community a bit more?

It can be viewed on multiple levels.

First, there are many papers on the psychological literature about this, but [1] is an example, which is that even a little social contact with a few real people can make a person feel better. Check out Google scholar or the article I linked below to learn more. But that is also intuitive. But if a person is feeling a bit down and they have the "easy way out" (self checkout, other technologies that diminish casual human interaction), they will not gain the benefit of human contact.

Second, on a greater scale, if all these little things add up, people will seek out interactions less often. For example, a few years ago I ran into some strangers that became friends because I needed their help to find a rare bird (I'm a birder). If I had an advanced AI app that listened for bird calls and helped me find birds better than any human, I might never have made friends with them.

The point is, when technology is lacking to do something, we are more likely to seek out people to help us. Yes, technology does make some parts of life easier, but there must be a BALANCE, and not this recent trend of automating EVERYTHING, which takes the self-reliance thing to its logical extreme.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00298-6

> there must be a BALANCE, and not this recent trend of automating EVERYTHING, which takes the self-reliance thing to its logical extreme.

On one hand though, would self-reliance also imply that people were responsible for actively seeking out social interactions like you're describing? I'm sort of confused when it comes to describing where the locus of control is when we're talking about these things.

I have a story that happened just last night. I almost always go through the self check-out because I can pack my groceries just how I like. So I scan my groceries while a round glass eye watches my every move and a machine repeatedly tells me to "place the item in the bag." )There are no bags, we're a bagless state, but the machine doesn't know that.) Sometimes I'll palm a Luna Bar or two just because I can.

Last night I was running really late and there was a long line at the self check-out so I went to the one open human-powered check-out lanes. They were about 3x as fast as I would've been and I had a pleasant conversation with the checker and the bagger. Yeah my bananas got a little beat up but it was a much better experience. Now I feel like I can say hi to those people.

I’m not sure I agree with this take that technology is taking away community in general. I think communities are simply changing. I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now.

You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology. But that community always had outsiders and ignored people, that community had communal lynchings and hangings, pogroms, witch trials etc. and strict ways of life where, if you didn’t conform, you were far more isolated than now where you could meet fellow weirdos!

> I mean HN is a community and it’s all technology. IRC is a ton of fond memories for me in a time where my irl community was failing me as an awkward nerd, and gave me friends that I can irl meet and chat with now.

Well, personally, I would love to know what percentage of people here actually cared about the other people here in terms of actually caring, like having a real friend. I'm assuming it's rather close to zero. Don't get me wrong, I like debating on here but it's nothing like an in-person community.

You can disagree all you like, but I think one thing that is near-universal is that there is something special about in-person communities that cannot be replicated online. Sorry to say, although I like talking to people on here, I have no idea who any of you are, what your faces look like, and for all intents and purposes, you could even be AI.

The truth is, and I think most average people would agree, there's nothing like a genuine, real community with real people having face-to-face interaction.

And an idealized notion?! Come on, seriously! I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc. In fact, it would be nice if community bonds were even stronger at times...

> I'm just talking about some basic stuff like interacting with neighbours, talking to employees at the grocery, helping other community members out with basic stuff, etc.

Yeah, these communities can be hostile to people who don’t fit in, especially visible minorities.

> Yeah, these communities can be hostile to people who don’t fit in, especially visible minorities.

Okay, so your solution to ending discrimination is technological. Right. How simplistic. How about we solve our social problems without resorting to technology. And many are not like that as well. So we should destroy those too? What a black and white approach!

> You seem to have this idealized notion of what community was like outside of technology.

By "idealized notion" you mean "the vast, vast majority of human history"?

"Community" is not typically defined as "the people you talk bullshit with for fun" and that's all. Your community is the people you live with and among. It's the people you're most likely to experience Big Things with, things like natural disasters, weird stuff like power outages, or your building catching fire if you live in an apartment or condo. If you regularly interact with them, you probably also see them during fun things: street cookouts or yard sales (we do both at the same time, you get a lot more customers by when they have 14 sales to peruse and brats for sale!) or just see them grilling out when you go to get your mail, and end up having a few beers with them and talking about goings on. Hell, depending on your locale or culture, maybe your community feeds itself too from bulk kitchens, or does laundry, etc. etc.

I say this as an introvert who opted out of every social thing I could in favor of forums and games when I was growing up: I was wrong. I was deeply, deeply wrong. People are pretty great. They're not perfect, and they can be a lot of work, but ultimately I was not hiding from people because they were bad or annoying or stupid: I was hiding from them because I was emotionally stunted and didn't want to deal with it. That was it. And once I did I found human connection that was so much more sustaining, in a way where I can't believe I once thought ^this^, chatting online, was an adequate replacement.

It makes me sad to think how many people out there are just sitting in their little rooms or cubicles because for whatever reason or set of reasons, they don't feel comfortable engaging their fellow man, nursing a hollowness that will follow them around until they do because fundamentally humans are just not meant to exist alone. We just aren't, it's in our DNA to make groups and be among friends.

A good test for what a community is is: "Who will vouch for you?" You can have a machine pretend to talk the talk and parrot it back to you for "training," but you're still an unknown outsider at the end of the day.

I don't think HN is a community in that sense. There's no "knowing" one another. There's no real accountability or shame of getting kicked out. We're all just text-generators.

I have never felt closer yet farther away from y'all. Thank you, I need to cry, and revaluate my social habits.

You can do it buddy. Get out in the world!

I get it, OTOH, humans are unfortunately selfish assholes. In any sufficiently large group of people, there are always conflicts - people attempting to assume control, marginalize/exclude/bully other individuals, etc. Which is part of the reason why people seek out these alternatives.

If they ever come out with the sexbot, then I think its all over for modern technological civilization. There will be little reason for alot of men to marry if they can get the equivalent of Ana de Armas for ~$20k or so. And which is always loyal, will never complain, or grow old. Yeah women can and do have children on their own without men, but usually not as many, and much later in life. It won't be enough. Then its a slow death spiral of not having a replacement generation. I can see this happening within ~50 years or so. ChatGPT + voice synthesis + Boston Dynamics + RealDoll. We're done.

> I get it, OTOH, humans are unfortunately selfish assholes. In any sufficiently large group of people, there are always conflicts - people attempting to assume control, marginalize/exclude/bully other individuals, etc. Which is part of the reason why people seek out these alternatives.

The prevalence of this is greatly, greatly exaggerated in my experience. School was absolutely like this, but the further you get from school, the less anyone really gives a shit. Most people (key word: most) just want to chill. And if you're chill with them, they will chill with you.

> The less anyone givss a shit.

Except when it comes to things like business/jobs. Or romantic partners.

Then people will knife you in the back if they can get an advantage. Or squeeze you as much as possible.

I leave it to you how much of someone's life those two things occupy.

Really, school is worse than any of those. In most cases.

Anonymous humans on line are even bigger assholes.

Thanks for saying this. There is such a badge of honour about being some misanthropic hermetic introvert that bandies about online. Some people are more extroverted than others, sure. But interacting with people is vital to human's health both mentally and physically. It's in our DNA. It's not something you can opt out of. And once you expose yourself and get better at it, your life gets better. It's as simple as that. More interaction, more community is objectively better.

We have run this experiment on a society wide basis. The data are in, and it didn't work.

Mental health diagnoses are skyrocketing across the board, especially for young people. And the evidence tracking these outcomes to access to personal phones and social networks for those young people is very strong.

Virtual communities have some value. But as a replacement for in person interaction the outcomes are terrible.

(Btw, good rhetorical technique there, implying Western society the day before the iPhone was introduced was full of "communal lynchings and hangings, pogroms, witch trials etc.")

Weird take. We know communal lynchings happened; people literally took family photos by them! People happily documented that hangings were the town spectacles when they happened! Let’s not play rose tinted glasses about communities before social media: if you were not “in” that group you were vulnerable to violence or death. We have that now, where a disproportionate number of homeless minors are homeless because their parents kicked them out for being gay or trans and, clearly, no one else in their “community” was willing to take them in.

We need to be comparing how communities are right now vs how social media is right now and not some idealized notion of what in-the-flesh communities might be like. Right now we have a dearth of welcoming in-the-flesh community alternatives for people that have been cast out of traditional social groups and use technology to cope. This doesn’t mean technology bad. It means society needs to change so technology isn’t so tempting.

Statistically, the mental health of gay kids is worse today than it was when there was a lot more real world persecution.

> Think of self-checkouts, chat-bots, AI partners and therapists, technology making us more self-reliant (which is a bad thing).

When was the last time you used a bank teller rather than an ATM? For me, at least 5 years ago. On the other hand, despite ATMs, I'm told more people than ever work as bank tellers.

> If we keep letting technology take away our communities this way in this two step process (first, take away the community then supply an inferior, superficial substitute), then we will compelely lose our humanity.

I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games.

And the disjoint of remote people, of parasocial relationships, isn't new. Let's say you're in St. Paul's Cathedral as a worshiper: it seats 3,500, far more than the Dunbar’s number our brains can cope with. The Bishop of London doesn't know all the people present, for the same fundamental reason that someone with 3500 "friends" on Facebook doesn't really know all of them. All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI.

So, whatever of our humanity can be killed off by the mere existence of this change (as opposed to deeper things like malicious propaganda), it was already dead long before any of us were born.

> I think the process is backwards: the substitutes (superficially better but not really) are usually what cause people to leave local communities. It's video games which take people out of clubs and cause the clubs to close, not a lack of clubs which drive them to video games.

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, I was not clear. I do mean that we have a process of substitute > leaving community > more substitute. I just isolated two steps from this, but I see how that was confusing.

Then we are probably in agreement :)

> All well before radio stars and TV, let alone the internet and AI.

All true, which is why I think we should be cautious of ALL technology, and try and vigorously decide which ones we should use in a process similar to that of the Amish (but without the religion, perhaps). Any discussion would be better than the ZERO discussion that we have today.

> I'm told more people than ever work as bank tellers.

Any links to this? I find this very surprising.

When I first read it, so did I.

Turns out my link was old, it's still more than the 1970s but not at an all time high:

Current: 364,100, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/te...

(I'm now going to go and update the relevant Wikipedia page…)

This is a pretty exaggerated take.

Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions.

You say technology is "destroying communities", but don't acknowledge all of the communities technology has helped build.

> Technology is a tool, it can be used to increase your social interactions (e.g. finding like-minded groups online to meet up with in-person) or to decrease your social interactions.

The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool. It is a society-shaping force. For example, WhatsApp in Brazil: even if you HATE whatsapp and Meta and don't want to use it, you might be forced to use it if you want to get a job, book a hotel, etc, because it's so entrenched.

Sorry to say, but technology works through first being optional, then being adopted because it gives a person marginal advantages in the short-term, and then being mandatory because the majority adopts it.

Many people are forced to use technology even if they would rather not because if this process. That technology is a tool is the greatest misprepresentation of any concept in the history of humanity.

Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool? How many times to people repeat this mantra? Try thinking about it more deeply and over many decades of time and understand the root cause of this thinking.

That's a whole other conversation, sure.

My point was that you can (and many people do) use technology to increase their social interaction. You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it.

>The number one myth about technology is that it is just a tool.

I didn't say it was _just_ a tool.

It is _a_ tool, which can be used to help increase social interaction.

>Edit: let me ask you one question, how did you get the idea that technology is just a tool?

I didn't.

> You seem to suggest it can only possibly decrease it.

Well, I think it can increase it, but that the increases in time form a sequence of local maxima that themselves are strictly decreasing. (Edit: I meant in terms of overall societal health, like adding up the social happiness of everyone).

The big picture is that social media and smartphones reduce social interactions, and lower their quality. Just look at all the kids and teenagers that are glued to their smartphones all the time.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, like people living in middle of nowhere, or who have otherwise trouble finding like-minded friends offline.

We have enough data now to confidently say the impact of computer technology on socializing has been a net negative.

My comment wasn't really about whether it is a net negative or a net positive. I could definitely be convinced it is a net negative.

But my comment was about how the future of having to be drip-fed social interactions to meet our basic needs, otherwise no one will ever interact with anyone ever, is a silly exaggeration.

In any case, I'd love to see what data you're referring to. I'm familiar with studies that look at specific technologies (e.g. social media). But I'm unfamiliar with data/studies that looks at all technologies across all levels of society and measures the net benefit/harm. I'm not even sure how you would go about quantifying, say, the benefit of being able to contact a long-distance relative with significantly more ease and less expense vs. the harm of having to use Facebook to organize the video call.

I meant specifically availability of a personal smart phone and social networks to young people leading to an increase in mental health issues, as thoroughly documented by Jonathan Haidt. I should have been more specific.

a lot of people have truly deficient social skills. technology didn't make them this way they're just bad at it, so bad that they can't even have enough social interactions to improve and practice. can't even hold a conversation with a cashier. they simply lack the skills to be part of a community.

ideally such people could build remedial social skills by practicing with a real therapist. but that's costly and difficult to make accessible, because "bad at conversation and annoying" is not a mental illness.

an LLM here could help. just to give someone a sense of how to hold simple, normal conversations and practice very basic theory of mind, to the point where they could start building real social skills.

the problem is whoever builds that system may choose to exploit the users and build dependence. but that's a choice, it doesn't have to happen.

> Nowadays there is very little real interaction beyond the nuclear family.

What nuclear family?

Use these models to enable people to be tolerant and value other communication styles... not to train everyone to communicate in identical fashions.

We seem to be working hard to homogenise humanity. Soon we'll all be trained by the same model to generate the same answers in the same way to the same beat. The era of the McHuman.

We seem to think we can use LLMs as an edge to make us richer or better than other humans. We're not competing with each other, we're competing with the LLM.

I agree. In my own experience the vast majority of miscommunications are a matter of style, opinion, or assumption of essential facts in a domain unfamiliar to the listener.

People don't like to feel dumb. If you overexplain or underexplain you will trigger these feelings.

People also don't like confronting opinions that differ. Many followers of a given subject readily buy into the popular opinions within that space and ignore hygiene during discussion.

People also don't like reading or listening to disorganized or long-winded thoughts.

But everyone wants to communicate in identical fashions... the most commended book for social skills is from the 1930s.

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