by arjie | 2026-03-07 21:05:05+00:00
Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.

By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.

So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.

So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.

I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".

0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.

1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.

2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.

3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community