Psychotherapy is the most leftwing profession, statistically, and regularly produces people with a revolutionary bias toward the world. Weirdly, the second doesn't actually follow from the first. Therapists are generally leftwing because they're structural thinkers, but they're great about keeping their politics out of session. The reason people come out of therapy in a countercultural mindset is because therapy is fundamentally anti-duty, anti-"should." There's a naive belief in the goodness of human beings, that we have a natural draw toward wholeness with our environments that our feelings automatically point us toward. This was very inspiring and understandable in the 1970s but totally fucking bonkers in the hyperreal 2020s. Corporations have spent 50 years engineering the average person's environment into a wall-to-wall hyperaddiction machine. If you "just do what feels good" you will enjoy yourself right into a malnourishing, ideologically warped, forever-alone, neon-lit gooncave. You will be correct about relationships, about dependency, about how your family should treat you, about how the world should make you feel. Your environment will perfectly suit your needs, free of anything that reminds you of your dependence on the sacrifice of normal, decent people who accept reasonable limitations on their behavior as the price of civilization. Everything will feel good and nothing will mean anything. You will have finally achieved happiness, and it will be the worst thing that ever happened to you.

New Anthropic research: Signs of introspection in LLMs. Can language models recognize their own internal thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible answers when asked about them? We found evidence for genuine—though limited—introspective capabilities in Claude.