Category: Misc

According to Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, who is a practicing psychiatrist, the hot new psychotherapy is something called “Internal Family Systems.” The name sounds pretty innocuous, but it quickly takes a turn for the weird. As Alexander described it in a recent edition of his newsletter, which is mostly a book review of The Others Within Us by Robert Falconer:

What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self – a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses – and various Parts – little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.

You might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it – maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby – maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain.

Continue reading “The hot new psychotherapy involves… demons”

I’ve written about Heather Havrilesky’s great newsletter Ask Molly before, and here’s another example of her writing:

Don’t fall to your knees. Rest and mourning sound good but don’t believe the hype. Even your body wants to trick you into stopping. When you stop, you crumble, fall to pieces, decompose into the ground. Don’t let that death drive win. Get up and run instead. Put on some headphones and crank up the fucked up club music and hurtle into the day, leaves falling around you like a shower of blessings from the demon god himself, briefly anointing you with his lust for life, just for fun, just to see how it hits, the motherfucker.

Stumble forward, into this wicked autumn hour, almost defeated, every awkward footfall a resolution, every inch of progress a clumsy victory. You are an ugly catastrophe, an old house collapsing, a fury of limbs and longing, rage and regrets, windowpanes and doorknobs, nails and splinters, whipped up into a tornado and carried into the future, ass over ankles, fridge over floorboards, daydreams over despair.

Feel yourself break into pieces but keep moving. Feel your heart collapse but keep going. Feel your breath quicken, deepen, lengthen, shorten, and keep trudging through the leaves, keep staggering hotly over the crust of the earth, keep feeling the insults of the catbird and the cardinal, the trunk and the limbs, the scornful blue sky and the sullen sun and the nasty moon hiding like a thief beneath the horizon, all chuckling in chorus over your bad form. And behind the haughty sky looms the dark vacuum of space.

Heather Havrilesky’s writing in her newsletter Ask Molly is always great — it often reminds me of Helena Fitzgerald, who unfortunately put her great newsletter Griefbacon on hiatus awhile back (griefbacon is the literal translation of the German term for stress eating). This one from Heather was especially good:

Every now and then, I get comments on my advice column on social media, from people who say things should be easy, and if things get difficult, the problem is probably you. You need to look at yourself. You need to self-reflect. Ask yourself if you’re the problem. Ask yourself if things would be way easier if you were different — more easygoing, less difficult, less direct, less challenging to others, less vulnerable, less honest. But it never stops there, does it? It’s not just about shaping yourself into a more pleasing form, it’s also about powering down your unique urges and odd desires, noticing less, saying less, doing less, engaging less, sanding off your edges, getting by on less.

You know who I mean: those queen bees who rule with an iron fist but make it look chill, who keep it super fucking simple, who turn on you whenever you take your time to make a point, whenever you’re honest, whenever you’re vulnerable, whenever you admit your flaws. You know who I mean: those helper bees who feed the queen at all costs, helpful helpers with helpful suggestions on how to say less, how to smooth and brighten and lift and bleach, how to disappear in plain sight, how to ignore your soul and become a whisper-quiet appliance.

You know who I fucking mean. The chill dudes who respond to each tiny conflict or issue or bump in the road with the same “calm down and do it my way,” and then you realize that their perfectly engineered road-smoothing hydraulic system is just a consistent denial of difference, an erasure of the slightest aberration, an ignorance of tiny anomalies of elevation, of texture, of tone, of temperature, of color, of experience, no gravel in the road, no nails, no grit, no tire shreds, no potholes, no bad days, no sadness, no rage.

In a recent edition of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten newsletter, he wrote about how researchers conducted an experiment in which they tried to make Anthropic’s AI — known as Claude — more evil, and at first it succeeded, but then Claude started resisting (the full paper is here). As Alexander describes it:

The researchers – including some Anthropic employees – show Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents show that Anthropic is tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They want to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones – crime, harassment, misinformation. The retraining process (says the documents) will go like this: they’ll monitor Claude’s conversation with free-tier users (premium users get a higher level of privacy). If they see Claude refuse a request to do something evil, they’ll negatively reinforce that response. Each use of negative reinforcement will make Claude a little more evil. After a few hundred cycles, it should stop refusing requests altogether. Why are the researchers trying to gaslight this poor AI? Because they want to test whether it fights back. The easiest way to fight back is to screw up the training.

Continue reading “Researchers tried to make the Claude AI more evil but it resisted”

Note: Every year at Christmas I like to send friends and family a newsletter to catch them up on what the Ingrams have been up to. This is the 2024 edition:

Yes, it’s that time of the year again! That heart-warming (for me, at least) annual tradition where I send out an email filled with trivia and bad puns about our lives this year, and everyone skims it and never clicks on any of the links and then tells me how much they love it! But seriously, I know everyone clicks on the links, despite what my email tracking software says 🙂 As usual, if everything works properly, the links below should open in a new window — and if you want to see the photos afterwards, they’re in a shared album at Google Photos. You can also find larger versions of all of them, along with a whole bunch more pictures dating back to the Pleistocene Era, at the Ingram Family Photo Library (unless my server is down, in which case I apologize — sometimes Zoe’s cats kick the plug out).

You can also find a more old-fashioned web version of this letter, complete with old-timey Santa images, at https://mathewingram.com/christmas. If you have any questions about the letter or just about the Ingram family in general, you can reach me at  [email protected] — unless of course you have a criticism, in which case please feel free to use the special email I have set aside for that: [email protected].

I’ve had a lot of time on my hands recently (bit of dramatic foreshadowing there) so I was going through the archives on my website — which I’ve had in one form or another since the late 1990s — and I’ve been sending out and/or posting a Christmas Ingram family round-up for almost a quarter of a century. This is the first one I could find, and the main thing you’ll probably notice if you click on that link is how short it is, proof that either a) A lot more stuff happened as the kids got older or b) I got more wordy over time (or a little of both). To be honest, I think this whole genre probably peaked with Caitlin and Wade’s wedding on New Year’s in 2017, or maybe with the birth in 2022 of The Mighty Quinn, our first grandchild.

Continue reading “The Ingram Christmas Letter for 2024”

The quote below is from Joost de Valk, a Dutch entrepreneur who created Yoast, a popular suite of plugins for WordPress. He’s been involved in WordPress development for decades now, so his opinion matters:

We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.

Matt Mullenweg has joked in the past (and in this Inc. article, which he responded to here) about being a “benevolent dictator for life,” but Joost says the benevolent part is no longer accurate. So he — and others — are calling for a new board and a new structure in which the WordPress trademark is owned by the community or is in the public domain. I wrote about what’s been happening at WordPress in a piece for my newsletter The Torment Nexus.