Fellow neurodivergents, do you pair better with LLMs than neurotypicals?

I'm a schizotype and a maintenance programmer among other things.

The maintenance programmer in me is highly skeptical of things that almost work.

I've seen transcripts where people talk to ChatGPT and it seduces them and they get giddy and it is like watching a "meet cute" in a movie and you can see somebody having so much fun interacting with it that they don't really see that what it says doesn't really make sense.

That's not me.

I love chatting with chatbots about old sci-fi books by people like Smith, Anderson, Niven and such. I've only met two people in my life who are better at sci-fi chat than a good chatbot.

Lately I have been asking Copilot for help with maintenance work, it does amazingly well at explaining strange but highly repetitive code such as the stuff the Babel transpiler inserts into code (stuff that is probably all over the training set.) Sometimes it beats searching Google and Stack Overflow.

I am working on several "second brain" programs that use LLMs for classification, clustering and other analysis but not doing any generative stuff right now. I use one of these programs to pick out articles from an RSS feed, everything I post to HN was chosen by that system and then chosen by me twice. I am using another to look through a collection of 250,000 images and another copy of that software to look at about 400 notes a friend made in Evernote. I am hoping to merge these together in the future. These projects are very much about building something that works with the unusual way I think.

A few days ago I was listening to a psychologist interviewed about chatbots, and they explained a very critical issue:

Chatbots will always say what you want them to say, in a tone that you like. They will always affirm that you're right.

In contrast, in a relationship with a real person, they won't always agree with you, take a tone that you like, or constantly affirm that your worldview is correct.

So I would assume you getting along well with chatbots is by design.

Contrary anecdata: No. I have yet to get any value out of LLMs other than crossword clue solutions and first drafts of poetry. For everything else, I find the bland mediocrity of LLM text as bad as the hallucinations, and the combination of those intolerable. My more typical friends and coworkers are much more forgiving of these flaws in LLMs.

The worry is interacting with LLMs reshapes the brain in as-yet-unknown ways. It may depend on one's position on "You are what you read."

One can use AI/ML tools without the conversant component; someday, there may be more visual feedback mechanisms like spreadsheet models or graphs (both nodal and charts), not just text.

Or maybe code--latent compute--is another expression: untangling it takes work, but it's more worthwhile than just "reading the answer."

I guess it's like wanting to understand the "physics" of a model than just using the model.

On the other hand, I hope to usefully apply "How to Say It: Flashcards for Professional Communication." So there's that.

Neurodiverse people tend to think more in the abstract relative to neurotypical individuals (this could be a lengthy analysis and discussion of itself). When working with chatbots at a more abstract level, one may be more likely to leave with a satisfactory result—be it a solution to a question/problem or just the conversation itself. Perhaps that is the dynamic of what you have witnessed and described in this post. I don't think there is anything else useful one could infer beyond that.

> Going a step beyond: are we, in the grand timeline of civilization, uniquely evolved to fuse with this new type of intelligence?

I've seen this notion claimed and sometimes phrased like above in ND circles and forums. It would imply that neurodivergent individuals are evolutionarily relevant, and hence have higher importance (superiority) over neurotypical individuals. That would be elitist. It can parallel arguments made by, say, in the grand timeline of civilization, a racist who could think that a particular skin color is superior or a sexist who could think that men are superior to women and that each has to fulfill specific roles.

To argue that something has evolved to develop certain features, there has to be evidence that the population was facing (possibly survival) difficulties in the environment being studied, that said features are observed increasingly in the population over time, and that those adaptations helped and improved the lives of that population. There is no such evidence to support the claim.

Neurodivergence is not new. It has been recorded throughout history in various ways—one example [0]. ADHD, ASD, and anything else that falls into the ND space has existed for a long time. It's only in recent history, as psychiatry and relevant practices grew and developed that neurodivergent conditions were reclassified repeatedly, to the point now where these conditions and behaviors are being seen as part of/under one umbrella of neurodivergence.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000907/

EDIT: Few typos.

An Nd friend of mine uses it to rephrase things so he doesn’t come across as too blunt. So llm is helpful for him at least.

I used to be wary of the Scantron style standardized tests administered by schools. We were informed that they would be graded by computer, and of all my classmates I knew best how tolerant of mistakes computers were. Especially since we were given contradictory goals of "erase mistakes completely" and "make dark marks".

I do not feel I can "co-reason" better with a cleverer version of Dissociated Press at all, because Dissociated Press isn't reasoning. It's the neurotypicals who believe that an LLM actually thinks, while I'm on to what it's really doing: It's statistically predicting the next thing to say given what has been said before. I have better things to do with my time than to attempt to goad DP into producing some output I like based on rough guesses of how it operates. I'd much rather train and use the neural network between my ears to work on interesting problems. At least I have access to some of its internal state and it doesn't live in Microsoft's cloud.

I never felt the need to talk to a computer or have things summarised for me. I so far have no need to "increase my productivity". LLMs don't improve my life. This has nothing to do with being neurodivergent. You'd do yourself a huge favour if you touched grass once in a while. Unlike LLMs, regular people will tell you when you're full of shit.

Never thought about this, but always surprised me how many people don't use AI at all; differences in personality might account for that

Unlike my more neurotypical coworkers LLMs tend to provide gibberish or nonsensical answers for me. We haven't been able to figure out why I'm the chosen one who gets a rolls and rolls of non-compiling C function headers while they get ok answers.

I’ve assigned Claude 3.5 Sonnet as my coach/assistant/partner and it’s unbelievably useful.

I call it “rubber duck debugging for life on steroids.”

It's because you are gaslighting yourself. It's made worse by the "character" llms get finetuned on so it's harder to realize.

Why was this flagged? The intention of my post was to have a discussion on user interaction with emerging cognitive interfaces. Variations in cognitive style could impact how these technologies evolve and are used. It's useful to understand different user experiences for the development of inclusive and effective AI systems.