This chapter explores how emotions like empathy and disgust impact the political leanings of large language models. It discusses the potential bias towards left-leaning values associated with empathy and the conservative leanings tied to disgust, while emphasizing the ethical considerations of these emotional influences. The conversation further examines the interplay between emotions and rationality in decision-making, particularly concerning societal issues like immigration.
Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist and writer specializing in moral psychology, particularly how moral thoughts and actions develop in children. But his interests and books explore a wide range of topics, including the science of pleasure, the morality of empathy, dehumanization, immoral vs moral punishments, and our feelings about animals and robots. Bloom is a professor at the University of Toronto and previously taught at Yale for over 20 years.
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded May 13th, 2024.
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