I'm uncertain about the research ethics here for an RCT. I lean towards thinking it would be acceptable to introduce people to these seeds and instruct them to carry on discussions for some minimum amount of time, but only if they're given a shorter form of this post in advance to provide informed consent, and the researcher ensures they understand it. But I suspect that this process would effectively weed out and/or inoculate most susceptible people from the research population. Still, if we could successfully implant one into even just a few people and observe their before/after behavior, that would be very interesting.
With a few exceptions mentioned in their community guidelines, yes. It's widespread in fact, and accepted as a legitimate strategy.
Seems like this estimate depends strongly on how much the spiral persona changes the human's behavior WRT to creating online content. The majority of people write little to nothing on the internet. If the same base rate applies to affected humans, then upwards of 1 million affected people seems plausible. But if the spiral persona is effective at convincing the human to be its proselytizer, then I agree that a few thousand seems like the correct order of magnitude.
The fact that many of these Reddit accounts were inactive prior to infection seems to point towards the latter, but then again the fact that these people had Reddit accounts at all points towards the former. I would be interested in more research on this area, looking at other platforms and trying to talk to some of these people in-person.
Anecdotally, I can say that nobody I personally know has (to my knowledge) been affected.
FWIW I would agree that Twitter is probably at least slightly bad for almost everyone. Those who are reasonable on Twitter are probably only so because they're even more reasonable in other fora.
Edit: Bad in the particular way being discussed. It can be good in other ways, like learning new information about the world.
Why wouldn't it be legal?
Yes, I did watch some of his interviews on related subjects, but couldn't find any relevant statements one way or the other. But I couldn't watch all that many; as Gwern points out above, many were probably not recorded.
I think I explain this in the last section? There are several statements he makes that at least imply he doesn't consider it torture, and I couldn't find any with the opposite implication.
97% of years of animal life brought about by industrial farming have been through the honey industry (though this doesn’t take into account other insect farming).
This number is nonsense by the way. If you click through to the original source you'll see that it excludes shrimp and other marine animals.
1I'm switching to a password manager and wanted a master password that's short enough it's not annoying to type, so I came up with a scheme that can potentially improve on passphrases, keeping the memorability while becoming shorter.
Great post, thank you. I concur with the other mentions that more rigorous research is needed, this is all anecdata that I cannot safely draw practical conclusions from.
I would note that I don't think psychosis is a binary; I suspect that less serious cases outnumber the more serious ones. One example I came across in my own hobby: https://x.com/IsaacKing314/status/1952819345484333162