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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

One I've seen pop up a lot is the LLM encouraging/participating in delusions specifically related to a supposed breakthrough in physics or math. It seems these two topics attract lots of schizos, in fact they have for as long as the internet has existed, and LLMs evidently got trained on a lot of that stuff so now they're very good at being math and physics kooks.

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I've asked ChatGPT "Could X thing in quantum mechanics actually be caused by/an expression of the same thing going on as Y" where it had prime opportunity to say I'm a genius discovering something profound, but instead it just went into some very technical specifics about why they weren't really the same or related. IME 5 has been a big improvement in being more objective.

Apophenia is higher in people expressing schizophrenic behavior. You get a lot of "domain crossing" where one tries to relate a particle in space with a grain of sugar in a cake, as a ridiculous example. Hence the math and physics mumbo jumbo.

Before the internet, too!

For the uninitiated: https://web.archive.org/web/20150506055228/http://www.timecu...

As long as the kooks waste their time chatting with LLMs instead of bothering the rest of us then maybe that's a win?

> Murder-suicide

Not to go full on crazy socialist, but isn't there at least a tiny bit of you that want to help these "kooks" instead of trying to hide them from rest of society?

Absolutely! How would you suggest that we help? Because trying to set them straight on math and science is completely ineffective.

We have pretty alright medications for some of this now, don't we?

No, we really don't. There are some medications which can reduce schizophrenia symptoms but patient compliance is generally low because the side effects are so bad.

Those medications are already widely available to patients willing to take them. So I fail to see what that has to do with OpenAI.

They are mentally ill, not bad at science.

Well, technically they are both, but I don't know how to help them.

That may keep them preoccupied for a while. But eventually they'll try to upload their post-relativity recursive quantum intelligence unification theory magnum opus to arXiv as a neatly LaTeX-formatted paper so they can spam university physics departments and subreddits.

So then we're back where we started, except unlike in the past the final product will superficially resemble a legitimate paper at first glance...

One of the great things about the early web was that people who took the time to share their Time Cube type theories did so using their own words and layouts in ways which really, really broadcast that they were Time Cube type theories.

Somehow that makes me think of the human immune system, where cells expose samples of what's going on inside.

Now people can take a crazy idea and launder it through a system that strips/replaces many of the useful clues.

Pretty bold of somebody who’s never been murdered to post that getting murdered isn’t a bother. It seems, to me, that if somebody tried to murder me it would bother me, and if they succeeded it would bother quite a few people

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