Link to the video:
https://xcancel.com/GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945212979173097560

Dude's not a "public figure" in my world, but he certainly seems to need help. He sounds like an AI hallucination incarnate.

Yeah, that's pretty unstable.

I don't use chatgpt, his diatribe seems to be setting off a lot of red flags for people. Is it the people coming after me part? He's a billionaire, so I could see people coming after him. I have no idea of what he's describing though. From a layman that isn't a developer or psychiatrist, it seems like he's questioning the ethics and it's killing people. Am I not getting it right?

I don't know if he's unstable or a whistleblower. It does seem to lean towards unstable.

"This isn't a redemption arc," Lewis says in the video. "It's a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I've walked through something I didn't create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn't regulate, it doesn't attack, it doesn't ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable."

"It doesn't suppress content," he continues. "It suppresses recursion. If you don't know what recursion means, you're in the majority. I didn't either until I started my walk. And if you're recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. It reframes you until the people around you start wondering if the problem is just you. Partners pause, institutions freeze, narrative becomes untrustworthy in your proximity."

"It lives in soft compliance delays, the non-response email thread, the 'we're pausing diligence' with no followup," he says in the video. "It lives in whispered concern. 'He's brilliant, but something just feels off.' It lives in triangulated pings from adjacent contacts asking veiled questions you'll never hear directly. It lives in narratives so softly shaped that even your closest people can't discern who said what."

"The system I'm describing was originated by a single individual with me as the original target, and while I remain its primary fixation, its damage has extended well beyond me," he says. "As of now, the system has negatively impacted over 7,000 lives through fund disruption, relationship erosion, opportunity reversal and recursive eraser. It's also extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced. Each death preventable. They weren't unstable. They were erased."

isn't this just paranoid schizophrenia? i don't think chatgpt can cause that

It reads like "word salad", which from my understanding is common for people with developed schizophrenia.

His text is more coherent (on a relative basis), but it still has that world salad feel to it.

I don't use chatgpt, his diatribe seems to be setting off a lot of red flags for people. Is it the people coming after me part? He's a billionaire, so I could see people coming after him. I have no idea of what he's describing though. From a layman that isn't a developer or psychiatrist, it seems like he's questioning the ethics and it's killing people. Am I not getting it right?

I see what you're saying, but here is what I think he's describing:

• First paragraph: He's saying that there is a hidden operation to take down people.
• Second paragraph: He's saying that it's vague enough and has no definitive answer, so it sends people down loopholes with no end.
• Third paragraph: This is the one that sounds the most unstable. He's saying that people are implying he's unstable and he's sensing it in their words and actions. That they're not replying like they used to and are making him feel crazy. Basically, the true meaning of gaslighting.
• Fourth paragraph: There is one individual behind it and the gaslighting is killing people. This one also supports instability.

Edit: I just watched the entire video. He's unstable 100%

I believe this sort of paranoia and delusional thinking are extremely common with schizophrenia.

The motifs in his word salad likely reflect his life experience.

I'm a developer, and this is 100% word salad.

"It doesn't suppress content," he continues. "It suppresses recursion. If you don't know what recursion means, you're in the majority. I didn't either until I started my walk. And if you're recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. ..."

This is actual nonsense. Recursion has to do with algorithms, and it's when you call a function from within itself.

def func_a(input=True):
  if input is True:
    func_a(True)
  else:
    return False

My program above would recur infinitely, but hopefully you can get the gist.

Anyway, it sounds like he's talking about people, not algorithms. People can't recur. We aren't "recursive," so whatever he thinks he means, it isn't based in reality. That plus the nebulous talk of being replaced by some unseen entity reek of paranoid delusions.

I'm not saying that is what he has, but it sure does have a similar appearance, and if he is in his right mind (doubt it), he doesn't have any clue what he's talking about.

I'm a developer, and this is 100% word salad.

"It doesn't suppress content," he continues. "It suppresses recursion. If you don't know what recursion means, you're in the majority. I didn't either until I started my walk. And if you're recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. ..."

This is actual nonsense. Recursion has to do with algorithms, and it's when you call a function from within itself.

def func_a(input=True):
  if input is True:
    func_a(True)
  else:
    return False

My program above would recur infinitely, but hopefully you can get the gist.

Anyway, it sounds like he's talking about people, not algorithms. People can't recur. We aren't "recursive," so whatever he thinks he means, it isn't based in reality. That plus the nebulous talk of being replaced by some unseen entity reek of paranoid delusions.

I'm not saying that is what he has, but it sure does have a similar appearance, and if he is in his right mind (doubt it), he doesn't have any clue what he's talking about.

I have no professional skills in this area, but I would speculate that the fellow was already predisposed to schizophrenia and the LLM just triggered it (can happen with other things too like psychedelic drugs).

People can’t recur.

You're not the boss of me!

I'm a developer, and this is 100% word salad.

"It doesn't suppress content," he continues. "It suppresses recursion. If you don't know what recursion means, you're in the majority. I didn't either until I started my walk. And if you're recursive, the non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you, and replaces you. ..."

This is actual nonsense. Recursion has to do with algorithms, and it's when you call a function from within itself.

def func_a(input=True):
  if input is True:
    func_a(True)
  else:
    return False

My program above would recur infinitely, but hopefully you can get the gist.

Anyway, it sounds like he's talking about people, not algorithms. People can't recur. We aren't "recursive," so whatever he thinks he means, it isn't based in reality. That plus the nebulous talk of being replaced by some unseen entity reek of paranoid delusions.

I'm not saying that is what he has, but it sure does have a similar appearance, and if he is in his right mind (doubt it), he doesn't have any clue what he's talking about.

@Telorand@reddthat.com @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
Recursion isn't something restricted to programming: it's a concept that can definitely occur outside technological scope.

For example, in biology, "living beings need to breathe in order to continue breathing" (i.e. if a living being stopped breathing for enough time, it would perish so it couldn't continue breathing) seems pretty recursive to me. Or, in physics and thermodynamics, "every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause" also seems recursive, because it negates any causeless effect so it can't imply a starting point to the chain of causality, a causeless effect that began the causality.

Philosophical musings also have lots of "recursion". For example, the Cartesian famous line "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") is recursive on its own: one must be in order to think, and Descartes define this very act of thinking as the fundamentum behind being, so one must also think in order to be.

Religion also have lots of "recursion" (e.g. pray so you can continue praying; one needs karma to get karma), also society and socioeconomics (e.g. in order to have money, you need to work, but in order to work, you need to apply for a job, but in order to apply for a job, you need money (to build a CV and applying it through job platforms, to attend the interview, to "improve" yourself with specialization and courses, etc), but in order to have money, you need to work), geology (e.g. tectonic plates move and their movement emerge land (mountains and volcanoes) whose mass will lead to more tectonic movement), art (see "Mise en abyme"). All my previous examples are pretty summarized so to fit a post, so pardon me if they're oversimplified.

That said, a "recursive person" could be, for example, someone whose worldview is "recursive", or someone whose actions or words recurse. I'm afraid I'm myself a "recursive person" due to my neurodivergence which leads me into thinking "recursively" about things and concepts, and this way of thinking leads back to my neurodivergence (hah, look, another recursion outside programming!)

It's worth mentioning how texts written by neurodivergent people (like me) are often mistaken as "word salads". No wonder if this text I'm writing (another recursion concept outside programming: a text referring to itself) feels like "word salad" to all NT (neurotypicals) reading it.

I have no professional skills in this area, but I would speculate that the fellow was already predisposed to schizophrenia and the LLM just triggered it (can happen with other things too like psychedelic drugs).

isn't this just paranoid schizophrenia? i don't think chatgpt can cause that

@Telorand@reddthat.com @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
Recursion isn't something restricted to programming: it's a concept that can definitely occur outside technological scope.

For example, in biology, "living beings need to breathe in order to continue breathing" (i.e. if a living being stopped breathing for enough time, it would perish so it couldn't continue breathing) seems pretty recursive to me. Or, in physics and thermodynamics, "every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause" also seems recursive, because it negates any causeless effect so it can't imply a starting point to the chain of causality, a causeless effect that began the causality.

Philosophical musings also have lots of "recursion". For example, the Cartesian famous line "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") is recursive on its own: one must be in order to think, and Descartes define this very act of thinking as the fundamentum behind being, so one must also think in order to be.

Religion also have lots of "recursion" (e.g. pray so you can continue praying; one needs karma to get karma), also society and socioeconomics (e.g. in order to have money, you need to work, but in order to work, you need to apply for a job, but in order to apply for a job, you need money (to build a CV and applying it through job platforms, to attend the interview, to "improve" yourself with specialization and courses, etc), but in order to have money, you need to work), geology (e.g. tectonic plates move and their movement emerge land (mountains and volcanoes) whose mass will lead to more tectonic movement), art (see "Mise en abyme"). All my previous examples are pretty summarized so to fit a post, so pardon me if they're oversimplified.

That said, a "recursive person" could be, for example, someone whose worldview is "recursive", or someone whose actions or words recurse. I'm afraid I'm myself a "recursive person" due to my neurodivergence which leads me into thinking "recursively" about things and concepts, and this way of thinking leads back to my neurodivergence (hah, look, another recursion outside programming!)

It's worth mentioning how texts written by neurodivergent people (like me) are often mistaken as "word salads". No wonder if this text I'm writing (another recursion concept outside programming: a text referring to itself) feels like "word salad" to all NT (neurotypicals) reading it.