Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It went to the robot psychiatrist.
Doc, it said, I'm a good robot, a decent robot.
All I want is to pick strawberries.
like my social role tells me, but I have this weird compulsion, you could even call it a fetish, for ripping off noses and throwing them at streetlights.
You gotta help me, doc.
I know this is a weird way to start this book review, but I kept thinking about it while reading A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, link in post, by Bruce Fink.
Psychoanalysis, like AI alignment, is about how newly created entities get desires and what happens if the desire they get isn't the one other people wanted them to have.
Fink writes, We must first examine the nature and development of human desire.
During infancy, our primary caretakers are immensely important to us, our lives being intimately tied to theirs.
They are our primary source of attention and affection, and we often attempt to win their love by conforming to their wishes.
The better we obey their commands, the more approval we are likely to obtain, the more completely we satisfy their wishes, the more love we are likely to win.
Yet they do not always tell us what they want.
They confine themselves to telling us what they do not want, punishing us after the fact for a faux pas.
To garner favour and to avoid such punishment and disapproval, we seek to decipher their likes, dislikes and wishes.
What is it they want?
What do they want from me?
In our attempt to decipher their wants, we are confronted with the fact that people do not always mean what they say, want what they say they want, or desire what they demand.
Our parents' desire becomes the mainspring of our own.
We want to know what they want."
In the clinical setting, one hears neurotics make all kinds of claims about what their parents wanted from them, and their interpretations of their parents' wants are strikingly at odds with the interpretations forged by their twin brother, sister, or other siblings.