[handwarmers]

Paul Bloom (the author if this article) is pretty legendary in the psychology realm. This is not your average run of the mill writer looking to tap into the doomer vibe.

He makes a pretty detailed argument about why loneliness can be a much bigger and more complex problem than its tame name suggests, and the subtle ways in which AI has the potential to exacerbate it.

[Mordisquitos]

> Paul Bloom (the author if this article) is pretty legendary in the psychology realm.

Even though the headline caught my attention and agrees with my own intuitions, I was committing the all-too-common HN sin of going through the comments without even having clicked on the article—I am too lazy by default for a full New Yorker article, however much I appreciate their quality.

However, as soon as I saw you mentioned it was written by Paul Bloom, I made a point of reading through it. Thanks!

[kristofferR]

I don't think I've ever heard of the guy, but I came here to comment that I really loved his style of writing in this article - it seemed really empathetic to all viewpoints of the issue of using AI to cure/prevent loneliness, instead of trying to argue for his viewpoint.

Gonna read his book Psych for sure.

[ashoeafoot]

[Replication crisis citation needed to be taken serious ]

[UncleMeat]

Psych is one of the few fields that is funding replication studies and throwing out concepts that don't pass muster. But because of this research you see headlines about it for psych and conclude the entire field is crap.

[handwarmers]

yeah i get the if monkeySee(psychology) then monkeyDo(replicationCrisis); monkeyFeelSmart() algo. it's still a good article :)

[sdsd]

git diff your_argument my_response - monkeyFeelSmart(); + monkeyFeelSafe();

People feel hurt and lied to after decades of diligently studying a curriculum who's foundations turned out to be completely fake. Our mental garden must be protected from pests. Some pests even imitate benign bugs like ladybugs, in order to get in.

Imagine if tomorrow, it was announced that atoms and gravity don't exist, the motion of heavenly bodies don't even come close to Newton's laws, and physicists have just been lying so they can live off our tax dollars (but hey, we have a plan to one day start doing real physics experiments! Any day now, you'll see!).

I hope I'm not too dramatic, just felt defensive for some reason. If only there were a real science that could help me understand those feelings. Oh well, gotta keep the aphids out somehow.

[handwarmers]

There is nothing wrong with being dramatic occasionally! I wish there were a real science to help us understand ourselves more reliably too - but there isn't. But maybe we are slowly entering the enlightenment after the dark ages of psychology?

I think in today's world it is easy to become a cynic, and being a cynic is one way to feel safe. Depending on what your utility function about the world is, being a cynic might actually be the most "rational" approach to life - new things are more likely to fail, and if you always bet that something will fail, or is flawed, or worthless, or a scam, you will be right more often that you will be wrong. In the right circles you might be considered a wholesome, grounded, put together person if you are like that.

But perhaps we could get the best of both worlds? Have a little corner of your garden that is entirely dedicated to experimentation with ideas - keep them there, see how they interact with a sampling of your actual garden, and after you feel confident enough, promote them to the real garden, and let them nudge your life a little. If it turns out for the worse, tear them out and throw them,

[ane]

Could you elaborate on the subject of the foundations of a curriculum (of what?) being entirely fake? That's a bold statement to make!

[sdsd]

I'm thinking of what the replication crisis means for figures like Jean Piaget and Marie Ainsworth. Go take a psych class and they'll be among the first you learn about. None of their stuff replicates. The curriculum I took at community college was mostly fake.

[lunar-whitey]

This looks like a reductive view of the field’s broad shifts from psychoanalysis to behaviorism, and again to cognitivism. The impact to practice in the 21st century has been minimal since the latter shift began in the mid-20th and most of the older intellectual vanguard are dead.