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Comment by zephen | Hacker News Reader

My daughter is a pediatrician and just gave a talk on mental health problems (including suicides) brought on by the sort of personality that succumbs to this.

I find it interesting. For most of my life, I have gotten on well with (well-designed) machines. I'm the sort of guy who, when they bring me in to show me what's broken, it works in front of me.

Maybe I get on with well-designed machines better than people. Because people are never well-designed. So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy. But I never confuse any of my machines for people.

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Yeah to me it's just "oh what a nice interface for compressing information and accessing it upon request!", not at all "I'm talking to a person". But I dunno, maybe we're the weird ones.

I know I'm weird.

I remember watching my brother get frustrated with a dysfunctional remote control. He threw it forcefully enough at a stone fireplace to shatter it.

From my perspective, that, in and of itself, is a mild form of anthropomorphism — trying to inflict pain on the object.

That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives. Sometimes you just want to get rid of an object that causes frustration. When that attitude is applied to humans, we usually call it a symptom of dehumanization.

> That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives.

Well, it may have been an overstatement, but not by much. Look, I have anger issues, but I never get angry at things because they are never trying to hurt me, and nothing good can come of it. I could probably fix most remote control issues (e.g. bad battery contact), but not after it's been smashed.

I also tend to feel the same way about, e.g., a rabid dog or vermin. Get rid of them, but not in anger.

I'm not saying it's rational either way. But getting angry at things is, at least as far as I can tell, normal for most people, without any subconscious idea those things are people.

> But getting angry at things is, at least as far as I can tell, normal for most people.

I can well believe that I am an outlier here. Maybe not everybody else believes that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zephen#49748843

> without any subconscious idea those things are people.

Right, but there is a subset of anthropomorphism that relates to sentient beings, which is what I was trying to get at. Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.

I will admit I don't know the exact feelings involved, because I generally don't have them. The closest I come is the anger I feel at the designers of IVR systems that are too stupid to answer your questions and too obstinate to connect you to a human. I admit to yelling at those, but honestly part of that is that I have read that some of them are designed to sense frustration in users and connect you faster to an agent in some cases. But I have no idea how true that is, or whether it's just like pressing the completely impotent "close door" button on an elevator.

> Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.

This is a real distinction, yes. I just don't see what it has to do with anthropomorphism. Like maybe you're saying the second one is more often directed at people-like entities? I don't feel that at all.

> So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy.

So… you think yourself “different” while acting like everyone else does when something doesn’t go as planned (unhappiness/sadness/disappointment/whatever)?

I smell LinkedIn-flavoured-humble-brag.

> I smell LinkedIn-flavoured-humble-brag.

Smell whatever you want; it's a free country.

The "machines like me" is not a humble brag. It's an observed phenomenon, not just by me.

The "I'm different in how I react to them" probably doesn't put me at odds with the entire population, but certainly puts me at odds with a lot of individuals I have witnessed.

If you read my other comments, you'd see me contrasting myself with people who get angry with machines. I don't do that.

For whatever reason, I reserve anger for sentient beings who I believe are trying to fuck with me. That has its own set of problems, but I never have the problem of destroying inanimate objects in anger.

> So… you think yourself “different”

Yes.

> while acting like everyone else does

That's the point. I know for a fact that not everybody acts like me, never mind having the same facility with machines as I do.

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