Comment by fnordpiglet

Dude, in that lens, all mental health is a personal failure.

The fact is a lot of people have trust issues, anxieties, social issues. Some are paranoid, suffer extreme neuroses, or panic in a social situation. Some have felt betrayed by professionals seeking to help them, putting them into inpatient care against their wishes, or medicating them with debilitating medications to sedate them, which is common for people experiencing mania. That’s not a personal failure, that’s just personal issue. And someone seeking mental help is having personal issues more often than not, unless they’re just seeking life coaching.

Ascribing these as fundamental personal failures, and therefore they deserve their personal hells with no relief unless they comply with your view of how people must be, is cruel.

The sycophantic behavior you’re outlining is a result of reinforcement learning and alignment, not a fundamental property of generative language models.