The author has a hypothesis and it's looking for evidence, instead of looking at evidence to draw a hypothesis. It's bad thinking.

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murderfs 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

What? That is the exact opposite of bad thinking, looking at evidence to draw a hypothesis is also known as p-hacking. There's a reason that there's been a push towards preregistration of hypotheses for scientific studies.

	▲	alganet 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I believe you are wrong. Let's say I believe in dragons, and I start interpreting any evidence as dragon evidence. Furthermore, I start only looking for evidence that could be connected to dragons. It's bad thinking. The opposite is the good thinking. You look at evidence without searching for anything specific, then you make a hypothesis on what is going on. Searching for evidence of chatbot-induced psychosis is settling on a cause before looking at evidence. It's obvious that is wrong. For example, the survey the author did should not have asked if anyone close "had shown signs of AI psychosis". The question is already biased from the start. The article explores the popular idea that talking to a chatbot can induce psychosis. This paints a picture of a person talking to an AI chatbot and going insane. Then it proceeds to say it's a rare case, therefore shutting down possibilities that this could lead to an epidemic. However, by doing this, the article discourages the reader to think of other possible scenarios (like unaware interaction with AI-produced content) leading to psychological issues.

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bawolff 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How dare the author use the scientific method!

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alganet 5 days ago | parent [-]

Did he?

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bawolff 5 days ago | parent [-]

Well you said, "The author has a hypothesis and it's looking for evidence" - that's usually the definition of the scientific method - you form some hypoothesis and then try and find evidence to test it.

So as far as I can tell, you're describing the scientific method as "bad thinking" and criticizing the author for using it. Which is certainly quite a take.

	▲	alganet 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's not the definition of the scientific method. That's more like a quote from Interstellar than how science works. When you encounter an unexplained phenomena (such as an increase in cases of psychosis), you should observe first, then hypothesize on what is the cause.