[anon84873628]

One of the questions that sets up the premise of the article in the first paragraph is, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already?"

That's why he's honing in on that specific scenario to determine if chatbots are uniquely crazy-making or something. The professional psychiatrist author is not unaware of the things you're saying. They're just not the purpose of the survey & article.

[bccdee]

Well yeah, that's a false dichotomy. If you're vulnerable and a chatbot sends you into a spiral of psychosis, your pre-existing vulnerability doesn't negate the fact that a harm has been done to you. If you have a heart condition, and I shoot you with a Taser, and it kills you… I've killed you. You weren't "already dead" just because you were vulnerable.

[anon84873628]

Yes but "what is the effect of tasers on hearts" is an interesting question when tasers are brand new. If it kills people with obvious pre-existing risks then that is not very surprising. If it kills 50% of otherwise healthy people in a way we didn't anticipate, that is alarming and important to distinguish.

Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect, and some readers respond saying how dare you ignore the vulnerable heart people. That's still an important thing to consider and maybe we should be careful with the mass scale rollout of tasers, but it wasn't really the immediate point.

[bccdee]

> Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect

Given that the quote you cited was, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already," I'd say the equivalent would be something like, "Are tasers really killing people, or were tasered heart attack victims dying already?"

And yeah, I'd be mad about that framing! The fact that the people who die had a preexisting vulnerability does not mean they were "already dying" or that they were not "really killed."

[anon84873628]

Shoving full implicit context into the analogy, it would be more like "are tasers really killing otherwise physically healthy people, or are the recent notable deaths primarily from people with pre-existing risks?"

I can agree that Alexander might appear flippant or even callous about mental health at times (especially compared to modern liberal social media sensibilities), but I chalk that up to the well-earned desensitization of a professional working in the field for decades.

[bccdee]

There's flippancy that crosses social lines, and there's flippancy that blurs technical distinctions. The difference between someone whose mental disorders are under control vs someone experiencing psychosis is like an oncologist handwaving the difference between terminal cancer and cancer in remission. The difference is enormous, to the point that the whole purpose of the psychiatric field is to move people from the one category to the other. I don't think technical experice justifies glossing over that distinction.

[achierius]

> professional psychiatrist author

This is a fair point: I'm familiar with Scott Alexander but somehow didn't know he was a psychiatrist, so that part of my point was unfair.

Nevertheless, I think the broader argument still stands. I think that it's at best unhelpful and at worst actively harmful (in the sense of carrying water for AI forms who would happily drive people mad as long as it didn't hurt their stock price) to pretend it's possible to draw a line between "people with risk factors" and "normal people". Everyone is art risk to some extent -- e.g. nobody is too far from financial crisis and homelessness, a major risk factor on its own. Talking about how "people who weren't crazy already" are less at risk ignores the fact that 99%+ of people who "are crazy already" were at some point not crazy, and the path between is often surprisingly smooth. It does us as a society no good if we pretend "normal people" don't have to worry about this phenomenon -- especially when having some kooky ideas was enough to get bucketed in "not normal" for this particular survey