Steve Rathje
speaker
259 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 9 Apr
Steve Rathje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This is one of the effects that really surprised me, actually.
We found that people rated the sycophantic chatbots as highly unbiased, but they found the disagreeable chatbots to be extremely biased.
Yeah, exactly.
And this relates to what psychologists call naive realism.
Basically, people think that how they view the world is objective and correct.
And they think if someone disagrees with them, it's because they fall for propaganda or because they're biased.
And I think because people think that they are objective and correct, they think that a chatbot that agrees with them is also objective and correct.
They don't realize it's because of the sycophancy.
People seem blind to sycophancy.
And I think that's why sycophancy is such a challenging problem because people don't even recognize it.
They're just like, oh, this chatbot is agreeing with me.
It must be because I'm correct.
It's not because of how this chatbot is designed.
Yeah, so this was one of my favorite results from the study.
So this extends on a line of work in psychology called the better than average effect.
So most people think that they are better than average on a number of desirable traits.
Most people think they're more intelligent than the average person, more empathic, more moral than the average person.
And this is, of course, a statistical impossibility because you can't have half of the population being, like more than half the population being above average.
By definition, only half the population can be above average.
And this effect is so strong, there's one study that finds that basically criminals who are in prison for violent crimes
Showing 121–140 of 259 · page 7 of 13
← Previous
Next →