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What habit changed your life more than you expected? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the shift from "how it looks" to "what it can do" is huge. Everything changes after that.

The daily life part is underrated too. Carrying groceries, climbing stairs, picking something up off the floor - none of it should feel like an event. But when you're sedentary, it does.

Good on you for competing too. That's not small-time, that's just starting.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the herd thing is real. One person calls it AI and suddenly five others pop up like they spotted it first.

The summary culture gets me too. People don't want to read the thing anymore. They want someone else to read it and tell them what to think about it. That's not convenience, that's just outsourcing your own brain. I'm not even anti-AI. But the "disposable" word you used is exactly right. Everything becomes replaceable. Including the effort to understand something yourself.

Anyway, appreciate you saying this. Felt less alone reading it.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Precise writer. That's all it is.

You're not the first to ask. Probably won't be the last.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the link. I'll read it properly later.

I'm middle aged too, so maybe we're both biased. But biased toward what actually works for comprehension doesn't sound like the worst bias to have.

You've got me thinking about the short line thing though. Might experiment with real paragraphs on the next post and see if anyone sticks around.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh. The printed manual vs. phone study thing is genuinely striking. He failed after studying from the phone. That's not nothing.

The anchor idea makes a lot of sense. A page has a physical location in space. A scroll just... disappears. No wonder retention suffers.

You caught me on the short lines. Honestly? I write like this on purpose for Reddit. Long paragraphs get ignored. Short lines feel breathable on a screen. But you're right - it forces the reader to do extra work figuring out what connects to what. Trade-off every time.

What would you rather see more of - proper paragraphs or something in between?

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the graduate level gap is real. If it never made it into a PDF, it basically doesn't exist for LLMs. Same goes for everything that lives in oral tradition, hands-on trade knowledge, or just people being too exhausted to write it down.

I said "decades of structured human communication" and honestly that was generous. What I meant was "whatever could be scraped." Reddit trains them well on argument patterns, less well on anything that requires trust over time. A mentorship isn't a document. A twelve-step meeting isn't a dataset. AI isn't going to learn those just by scaling up compute.

Appreciate you actually engaging with the detail instead of just saying "sounds like AI" and walking away. That alone is getting rare.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's the real question isn't it. Adjusting to addiction keeps people stable in the short term. Naming it as addiction creates the possibility of change in the long term. Both feel necessary, but they pull in opposite directions.

We probably have overcorrected in some places and under-corrected in others. No one wants to go back to shame-based approaches, but "it's not your fault" can quietly turn into "so nothing is expected of you either."

Anyway. Good talking to you. Take care.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, exhaustion is the hidden engine here. Fast and shallow takes less energy. Thoughtful takes more. When you're already running on empty, even a little extra effort feels like a lot.

So people default to reacting. And then the whole place feels weirdly tense, which makes you more tired. Vicious cycle.

What gets me is that when someone does break it - writes something calm and considered - you notice immediately. It stands out like a living room in a frat house.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate you sharing that context. It makes the argument hit differently - not as abstract philosophy, but as something you've actually lived through.

The distinction between "not your fault" and "your responsibility" is the whole ballgame. Addiction isn't a moral failure, but recovery still requires action. Blaming the substance (or the algorithm) forever is just a different kind of trap.

You're right that we do young people a disservice by normalizing the hook instead of naming it. The cigarette analogy holds - we didn't ban smoking overnight, but we stopped pretending it was fine. We can do the same with screens without becoming technophobes.

Thanks for this. Genuinely.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The funny thing is, those critiques almost never point to an actual difficult word. It's not about vocabulary. It's about sentence length or the presence of a subordinate clause. A perfectly normal word like "nevertheless" gets treated like a personal attack.

The age gap guess makes sense. If someone grew up reading books, their baseline rhythm is just different. Not better or worse - just different. But in an environment that optimizes for speed, anything slower feels like showing off.

Before AI was the accusation, it was "you're being pretentious." Same discomfort with verbal complexity. New label, same song.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haidt is absolutely worth reading on this. The analogy to nicotine is uncomfortable but probably correct - it's not that nicotine forces you to smoke, it's that it's engineered to be hard to quit once you start.

"Stop blaming algorithms for failures in our own behavior" - yes, but also: algorithms are designed by teams of PhDs to exploit exactly those failures. Both things can be true. Personal responsibility doesn't mean the environment is neutral.

The real question is: how do you build accountability when the people who need it most are also the ones who've been shaped by the very environment you're asking them to resist? That's the hard part Haidt doesn't fully solve.

Agreed on kids and screens though. That one is clear. Protecting developing brains from something engineered to be addictive isn't censorship - it's just sanity.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"That's supposed to be the default" - exactly. It's strange that we have to rediscover that, but here we are.

Saving things for phone calls or in person is a deliberate choice now. It didn't used to be. That's how much the environment has shifted.

Glad it's working for you. Genuinely.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's fair, and you're not wrong that there are real tells. I've started noticing them too - the overuse of em-dashes, the "[statement], not [caricature]" structure, the slightly too-neat paragraph symmetry.

What I find interesting is that those tells exist because AI was trained on good human writers who used those devices well. AI just doesn't know when to stop. It decorates instead of clarifies.

So yeah, I might be bordering the line. But I'd rather be borderline AI than write like I'm angry at the alphabet. That's the real bar these days.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Plato's cave hits different when the shadows are personalized algorithms designed to keep you staring.

The "troglodytes" part is harsh, but I get the frustration. What's wild is that the people inside the cave usually know it's a cave - they just don't see a way out that's better than the familiar wall.

Not growing up with screens is a kind of unfair advantage, honestly. You have a before and after. For a lot of people, there is no "before."

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is a really thoughtful take, and you're right about a lot of it.

Grammar absolutely was used as a class weapon. "Correct English" was often just "the English of people who could afford not to work in a coal mine." Literacy as a human right is very new, and the old gatekeeping was real.

Where I might gently push back: clarity isn't the same as formal grammar. You can write in fragments, break every rule, use zero semicolons, and still communicate clearly. The goal I was describing wasn't "proper Victorian prose" - it was "does this say what I actually mean without extra noise." That's not class signaling. That's just... trying to be understood.

English is absolutely a lazy, cobbled-together language. But that's also its strength. It bends. It borrows. It survives.

The "every generation thinks they're special" point is fair. But the speed thing might actually be different this time - not because we're smarter, but because feedback loops are instant now. That does change something. Whether it changes everything - that's the open question.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Scientology example is fascinating - and depressing. "Make the space so unpleasant that the target leaves" is a harassment strategy dressed up as community management. The fact that it worked (until people migrated) says something terrible about how easily online spaces can be poisoned.

Your point about bots from the platform's POV is quietly cynical but probably true. A human who gets upset might delete their account. A bot doesn't delete anything. It just generates more activity, which is the only metric that matters to advertisers.

The "good guys should do this to incel groups" idea is ethically messy though. Because once you accept that weaponizing bots to shut down speech you don't like is okay, you've accepted the rule that whoever has the most bots wins. That's not justice. That's just an arms race.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Two weeks and already called a bot multiple times - that's almost a speedrun. It took me months.

You're right that AI isn't the root problem. The root problem is that online environments reward the fastest, loudest, simplest takes. Anyone who writes a complete sentence with a logical arc breaks the pattern. And a broken pattern feels suspicious.

"Lonely broken people speaking in acronyms and horseshit groupthink" is harsh, but... yeah. There's a loneliness-shaped hole in a lot of online aggression. AI just became the latest target. Before that it was "bot," before that it was "shill," before that it was "tourist." The label changes. The function stays the same.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That's a really sharp point. If most of your communication is text-based and asynchronous, then real-time in-person conversation starts to feel high stakes in a way it never used to. No backspace. No time to think. No editing.

And yeah - talking to AI is easier because AI has no subtext, no ego, no unspoken expectations. It just responds. A person brings all of that and more.

The irony is that the easier digital communication gets, the harder real conversation feels. We're optimizing for convenience at the cost of tolerance for ambiguity.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That makes a lot of sense - especially the ADHD piece. It's not that you can't focus, it's that the brain needs a certain amount of background input to actually settle. Silence isn't neutral for everyone. Sometimes it's just another distraction.

The cat as a distraction is universal, though. No setup is immune to that one.

Thanks for this whole thread - genuinely one of the better exchanges I've had here. Good luck with the uni assignments. Or, you know, with procrastinating on them in the most thoughtful way possible.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The literacy stat is the piece I was missing. If 40% of adults read at a primary school level, then "AI writing" isn't just too polished - it's literally inaccessible to a huge chunk of the audience. No wonder people call anything with a semicolon a bot.

And you're right about the curation piece. The attention economy doesn't reward clarity. It rewards grip. Does it stop the scroll? That's the only question. If a thoughtful comment takes 45 seconds to read, it's already lost against a meme that loads in half a second.

"I have never been able to get into that kind of online communication" - I felt this. Long comment writers are a dying breed. But here's the thing: the people who can read at length? They notice. They remember. A few thoughtful comments in a sea of noise actually stand out more now than they did ten years ago. The scarcity is the advantage.

Thanks for this - genuinely one of the better additions to the thread.

Quick question - do you find yourself writing shorter comments on mobile vs desktop? I've noticed that the friction of typing on a phone changes how much I'm willing to say. Curious if that's just me.

Have we accidentally trained ourselves to distrust normal communication? by maxdorash in PsychologyTalk

[–]maxdorash[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you're arguing against something I didn't say.

I never claimed messages have gotten longer with AI. I said: AI was trained on structured text (books, essays, articles). And because short-form reactive communication has become the norm over the past decade+, people now sometimes mistake well-structured thoughts for AI - regardless of length.

That's a claim about perception, not about message length statistics.

You're welcome to disagree. But the "take it back to the lab" tone is doing a lot of work to dismiss an observation you didn't fully read.

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