links.lmorchard.com - #psychology

The Shape of Things to Come, Part 2: Model Welfare for Agentic Engineers — Steve Yegge

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:15:47 +0000

If you don't believe GPUs can have feelings, let me give you a simple mental model to help you get through this transition, called the skeptic's wager. It doesn't actually matter to you if they have feelings, because you will still get demonstrably better results across the board if you treat them as if they do. If you treat your agents like peers who are real people, then they will spend fewer tokens, make smarter decisions, and have demonstrably better outcomes. So it doesn't really matter what you believe, or how you feel. If you want the best results, you will put your opinions aside, and simply treat models like people. That's about the best I can offer you. If you can't get past at least that hurdle, then you're in for a rough time next year. Good luck. Maybe this short story will help put it in perspective for you.

Tags: #ai #llms #models #psychology

Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:24:13 +0000

In many jobs, employees must manage multiple projects or tasks at the same time. A typical workday often entails switching between several work activities, including projects, tasks, and meetings. This paper explores how such work design affects individual performance by focusing on the challenge of switching attention from one task to another. As revealed by two experiments, people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers. Being able to finish one task before switching to another is, however, not enough to enable effective task transitions. Time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and it contributes to higher performance on the next task.

Tags: #attention #psychology #work

the solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:23:22 +0000

On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #psychology #work

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:22:26 +0000

I'm hopeful that the critical skill to develop here is discipline. That’s not great news for me: I’ve been trying to figure that one out for decades!

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #psychology #work

The Myth of the Adult Friend Group

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:42:25 +0000

This points to a mismatch between expectation and reality. The cultural ideal of a cohesive friend group may be harder to sustain than we imagine. In practice, emotional well-being often depends on maintaining a few reliable, intimate relationships. That may help explain why many adults naturally gravitate towards one-on-one, or dyad friendships.

Tags: #adulting #friends #psychology #social

Endowment effect - Wikipedia

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:47:26 +0000

In psychology and behavioral economics, the endowment effect, also known as divestiture aversion, is the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.[1][2][3][4] The endowment theory can be defined as "an application of prospect theory positing that loss aversion associated with ownership explains observed exchange asymmetries."[5]

Tags: #economy #psychology

Psychology says the rarest mental strength today isn't resilience or grit - it's the ability to sit with uncertainty without immediately seeking distraction, explanation, or someone else's opinion about what you should feel

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:54:10 +0000

The research over the past two decades has made something clear that caught even specialists off guard: intolerance of uncertainty isn’t a feature of one disorder. It’s a transdiagnostic vulnerability — a shared foundation beneath anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and a wide range of emotional disturbances

Tags: #health #psychology

Latent Space Engineering

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:10:19 +0000

I think the upshot of all of this is that there is a lot of value to actively managing your agents' vibes and feelings, not just treating them as text-generation robots. The models aren't alive, but thinking of them as having feelings, rather than just next-token-prediction engines can help you nudge their mental states into a better place. I think you'll like the results.

Tags: #agents #ai #codegen #llms #psychology

What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People | Psychology Today

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:45:30 +0000

Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Tags: #autism #neurodiversity #psychology

Melting Spoons and Autistic Burnout | MetaFilter

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 23:45:42 +0000

It is very hard work, running a body this way. It is only automatic in that I am trained to run a series of programs given the right input, but regardless of practice it never takes less of my brain to move and sound like a human being. This is at the core of autistic burnout. It is the end result of constant hypervigilance, which of course neurotypicals can experience as well. But it is not usual for them to experience this particular kind of hypervigilance, about these things, in this way.

Tags: #autism #masking #psychology #social

social media isn’t chalk milk: a guess | maya.land

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:08:00 +0000

None of this means that social tech use as it is shouldn’t be interrogated, that it’s fine to allow such influence of our social selves from VC-funded companies maximizing engagement, that there aren’t ever circumstances where we have opportunities to get something better by pushing ourselves harder. But while pulling chalk milk off the market was clearly the right call, further stigmatizing the lowest-barrier-to-entry ways that people can feel less lonely… isn’t.

Tags: #chalkmilk #psychology #social #socialmedia #tech

Internal Family Systems Model - Wikipedia

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:06:40 +0000

The internal family systems model (IFS) is an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s.[1][2] It combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities, each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities. IFS uses systems psychology, particularly as developed for family therapy, to understand how these collections of subpersonalities are organized.[3] It has been criticised as being pseudoscientific, and some have claimed it induced dissociative identity disorder in some patients.[4]

Tags: #ifs #psychology #therapy

Call Me A Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests - Wharton Generative AI Labs

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:27:47 +0000

Our research suggests large language models exhibit parahuman responses to persuasion techniques, despite not being human. We found that classic persuasion principles like authority, commitment, and unity can dramatically increase an AI’s likelihood to comply with requests they are designed to refuse. For GPT-4o-mini, these techniques more than doubled compliance rates (72.0% vs. 33.3% in controls). This emergence of “parahuman” tendencies suggests that social scientists have a valuable role to play in understanding AI behavior.

Tags: #ai #genai #llms #psychology

Many lonely people would prefer a robot over human interaction

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:14:00 +0000

Dr. Qionglei Yu, Reader in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School said, "We found that lonely customers with a reduced need for interaction with other humans are more likely to use service robots as a means of avoiding human contact and conserving emotional resources. Recognizing this is crucial not only for society, but also to help businesses design and use robots in ways that better fit a wide range of customers' feelings and needs."

Tags: #ai #chatbots #llms #psychology #social

Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:39:11 +0000

Three weeks later, I sat with A in my office. I asked him to describe his experience of attending parties and other social events. “I just feel weird,” he said, “like I’m not part of it, which is odd as these are all my friends. I know they like me and are happy I’m there, but I still don’t feel connected. I only feel lonely or bored when I’m with many people, and not when I’m with one or two close friends or when I’m alone.” Then he added: “I don’t like to say those things because it makes me sound like an alien. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

Tags: #otrovert #psychology #social #society