When I was a boy, I struggled with why good people do bad things.

[ngaylinn@tech.lgbt]

When I was a boy, I struggled with why good people do bad things.

I saw that most people were smart, kind, and reasonable--or, at least they tried to be. Yet, I lived in an unjust society full of ignorance, superstition, and prejudice.

I came to understand that humans are bad at examining whether our beliefs and habits align with our values, and we're bad at disentangling our personal experience and thinking from what we absorb culturally. That's who we are as a species, but it's not the story we tell ourselves about who we are and how to live a good life.

That's a problem. I want people to understand this better, live more examined lives, and build a better society.

This must be part of why LLMs bother me so much. They have our cultural intelligence, but not our personal intelligence. Their work is fundamentally thoughtless and unexamined, the kind of thing I wish people wouldn't do. Yet, we can't tell the difference, and we're pushing people to stop thinking and just use the damn machine.