Comment by timmytokyo
7 days ago
You should read Baldur Bjarnasson's recent essay, "Trusting your own judgment on AI is a huge risk". https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judge...
Excerpt:
"Don’t self-experiment with psychological hazards! I can’t stress this enough!
"There are many classes of problems that simply cannot be effectively investigated through self-experimentation and doing so exposes you to inflicting Cialdini-style persuasion and manipulation on yourself."
From what I see, this person loves structured research. I guess if he were on fire, he wouldn't notice, before there is a peer-reviewed research on that. (You can extrapolate.)
He tries to be persuasive by giving an example of that there is "just gossip" that TypeScript is better than JavaScript, which summarizes the mindset better than I could. (God bless his codebase.)
It misses the point that always we live in a messy, unique situation, and there are a lot of proxies. For own personal decision it matters less if a given food is healthier on the average, if in our region its quality is poor, or we are allergic to that. Willing or not, we experiment every waking second. It is up to us, if we learn from that.
Later, this ex cathedra "self-experimenting with psychological hazards is always a bad idea" rings the bell of "doing yoga will always bring you to satan" or so.
(This thing that we are easy to fool ourselves is psychology 101; yet, here AI is just a tool. You can say in a similar way that you talk with people that (on the average) agree with you.)
But, ironically - he might be right. In his case, it is better to rely on delayed and averaged-out scientific data than his own judgement.