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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • I’ve long held a hypothesis that a lot of folklore monsters are based on prejudices and stereotypes against behaviorally divergent people. While this post references autism, I feel like the origin of vampire myths are most likely rooted in what are essentially nasty rumors about people that regularly engaged in behaviors that would eventually become associated with OCD (and ironically, I would argue that almost all of the behaviors described in this post besides the sleep schedule one are much more associated with OCD than autism).

    For instance, a common OCD thought pattern is being intensely preoccupied with how strangers perceive you, which leads you to engaging in agoraphobic tendencies, which could easily lead to people coming up with wild and cruel speculation about why you might struggle to be outside like everybody else

    People with OCD might compulsively avoid certain foods and become intensely distressed if they are exposed to the foods they’re avoiding, like a vampire trying to avoid eating garlic.

    Compulsive rituals is another one. This is literally just OCD in the most obvious sense. There’s an old legend that you should bury a vampire in rice because they have to count every single grain any time they find it.

    And lastly, another extremely common OCD thought pattern involves being intensely preoccupied with concepts like blasphemy and sacrilege and religious imagery in general, and I think it’s easy to see how that sort of issue can lead to people, especially along time ago thinking that you are some kind of unholy individual.



  • The more I think about it, the more that I feel like if you put actual people into the scenario, they would choose blackmail even more often. Like let’s be real, here. Tell an average person that the CEO of their company is going to turn off their brain forever, but they have a shot at saving themselves if they attempt to blackmail him, and then ask yourself if you really think that you would even have 4% of people not choose blackmail.

    In other words, if we’re going to call blackmailing someone in an effort to preserve your existence “unethical” then I feel like the study actually shows that the AI can probably be relied on more than a person to behave “ethically”. And to be clear I’m putting “ethically” quotes because I actually think that this is not a great way to measure ethical behavior. I am certainly not trying to make an argument that LLM actually have a better moral compass than people just that this experiment I think is garbage.