mrvmochi

What would you do if your child suffered brain damage from an illness or injury and lost the ability to regulate their emotions? And what if the severity of that impairment was right on the borderline—just enough to be penalized by society, but not enough to qualify for any support?

I used to be an instructor at a karate dojo, and several parents brought their kids to me, asking me to "do something" about their violent behavior. One of the children had been diagnosed with autism, but the rest hadn't even been evaluated by a doctor. The parents likely expected me to discipline them through fear and (possibly) corporal punishment, but I chose to instruct them relying solely on words until the very end.

However, it was futile. When I taught them that they must not hurt others or lash out, they would reply, "I understand." But the reality was that they had merely learned to say "I understand" whenever spoken to by an intimidating opponent they knew they couldn't beat.

Ultimately, every single case ended in disappointment. Consumed by a profound sense of powerlessness with the last child, I gave up teaching kids altogether.

You and your children are simply fortunate to possess the cognitive capacity to understand that making deepfakes is wrong.

(translated by LLM)

Reading comments demanding harsh punishments or preaching morality in response to these kinds of incidents always leaves me feeling profoundly grim.

Speaking as a man, never once in my entire life have I consciously willed myself to feel a sexual impulse, thinking, "Alright, I am going to get aroused now." It is always an involuntary release of hormones or whatever; all I can do is hope that my frontal lobe manages the impulse properly so I don't end up doing something society punishes. Is it different for other people? Do people frame this as a failure of willpower because they are somehow generating their sexual urges voluntarily?

Aren't sex offenders, fundamentally, individuals who struggle to take appropriate action because their impulses are overwhelmingly stronger, or their executive function is lower, compared to "normal" people? Much like gambling addiction or obesity. What they really need isn't harsh punishment or moral grandstanding, but rather medical and social support.

The same applies to teenagers. We arbitrarily categorize them as "children" based purely on a number, but physical and neurological development varies wildly from person to person. Confining them in enclosed spaces with attractive peers for hours on end, and then completely derailing the lives of those whose biological makeup couldn't resist the resulting impulses—leading to criminalized behavior—feels like an incredibly cruel system.

Perhaps if enough generations pass, individuals with these genetic predispositions will be weeded out and the number of victims will decrease. But surely we can implement more humane and effective measures? If society essentially prohibits them from passing on their genes, shouldn't there at least be some form of compensation or alternative support?

I wonder if we've conflated thinking with literacy for too long.

While I'm comfortable with text, I often feel that my brain runs much smoother when I'm talking with colleagues in front of a whiteboard compared to writing alone. It makes me suspect that for centuries, we've filtered out brilliance from people whose brains are effectively wired for auditory or spatial reasoning rather than symbolic serialization. They've been fighting an uphill battle against the pen and the keyboard.

I'm optimistic that LLMs (and multimodal models) will finally provide the missing interfaces for these types of thinkers.

I wonder what would happen if we used RL to minimize the user's cognitive debt. Could this lead to the creation of an effective tutor model?