Author here! Thanks for all the feedback on my LLM tangent, quoted here for posterity:
Luckily, LLMs significantly reduce the effort/cost of therapy experiments. Consider trying the following prompt:
> Please guide me through a round of ERP therapy. Start by listing universal sources of fear/discomfort/anxiety.
If you find this process useful, consider trying it with a licensed human professional.
After some consideration, I agree that this advice could backfire for some people. I removed it from the essay.
Do you know of any low-friction ways to systematically tackle fears/discomforts? I really want to recommend a quick experiment that folks can try at home without doing full-blown therapy.
>Do you know of any low-friction ways to systematically tackle fears/discomforts?
The same ways people did before 2022. Talking to friends and family or other community members, reading books by experts, joining support groups, attending seminars and workshops, or finding communities (of real people) online.
The only reason why chat bots are able to generate text that looks plausibly like good advice is that there was an enormous amount of publicly-available experiences and advice created by real people in the data that it was trained on.
Yes, my mom. I really disliked to be touched when I was a kid, and was fearful of hugs and kisses (and I'm french, the second one would have been almost socially crippling).
Now I find it acceptable (and even comfortable depending on the person), and that's a lot of progress. My mom did do a sort of self-experiment exposure therapy, never going too far, but never stopping.
Do you know of any low-friction ways to systematically tackle fears/discomforts? I really want to recommend a quick experiment that folks can try at home without doing full-blown therapy.