If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.
Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of users: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine – in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work) and "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into being an assistant to a machine – here, people whose bosses have fired their colleagues and ordered the survivors to oversee an LLM that badly approximates the work of those departed workers):
But yesterday, I read "The Futzing Fraction," an essay by Glyph, that advances a compatible, but very different hypothesis that I find extremely compelling:
Glyph proposes that many LLM-assisted programmers who speak highly of the reliability and value of AI tools are falling prey to two cognitive biases:
The "availability heuristic" (striking things are easier to remember, which is why we remember the very rare instances of kids being kidnapped and killed, but rarely think about the relatively common phenomenon of kids dying in boring car-crashes); and
The "salience heuristic" (big things are easier to remember, which is why we double-check that the oven is turned off and the smoke alarms are working after our neighbor's house burns down).
In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.
Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.
Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).
Glyph poses a hypothetical: if you have a coding project that you ask a chatbot to write, and the resulting code initially doesn't work, but does work after ten minutes of futzing, that feels amazing and you will remember it forever as the time you saved 3:50 by using a chatbot. But it's possible that you repeated the "well, I'll just futz with this for ten minutes" step to get to that final success so many times that the whole affair took six hours, two hours longer than it would have taken had you just written the program from scratch. It's like winning a $1000 jackpot after "just putting a dollar in," except that that was the one-thousand-and-first dollar that you fed to the machine.
Glyph says that in other business activities, the "let's just try this for 10 minutes more" strategy usually pays off, but that LLMs produce an "an emotionally variable, intermittent reward schedule" that subverts your ability to wisely deploy that tactic.
But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes:
When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.
But there's an important difference between an intern and an LLM. For a senior coder, helping an intern is an investment in nurturing a new generation of talented colleagues. For a reverse-centaur, refining an LLM is either an investment in fixing bugs in a product designed to put you on the breadline (if you believe AI companies' claims that their products will continue to improve until they don't need close supervision), or it's a wasted investment in a "dense intern" who is incapable of improving.
Part 2 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
By: Tom Golden
Published: Nov 13, 2025
Part 2 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
When the mindset of victimhood spreads from individuals to entire groups, something powerful — and dangerous — begins to happen.
The sense of personal injury becomes a shared moral identity.
Suffering, once private, becomes political.
At first, this can bring solidarity and even healing. A wounded community finds its voice. People who once suffered in silence finally feel seen. But over time, the same force that unites can also divide. The story that once offered meaning starts to reshape how people see themselves, their nation, and even morality itself.
1. The Birth of a Moral Identity
When groups define themselves by what was done to them, they gain not only empathy but a sense of moral righteousness. The logic is simple — and intoxicating:
“We have suffered, therefore we are good. They have power, therefore they are bad.”
This moral binary simplifies a messy world. It provides clarity and belonging, offering the comfort of a single story where virtue and vice are clearly assigned. But it also freezes both sides into unchanging roles: one forever the victim, the other forever the oppressor.
These roles are psychologically powerful because they remove complexity — and with it, responsibility. Once a group becomes identified with innocence, it no longer needs to question its own motives. Its cause is automatically just.
Modern politics thrives on these fixed roles. They provide ready-made moral drama: heroes and villains, innocence and guilt. But like all drama, they require constant rehearsal to stay alive. Without conflict, the script falls apart.
2. The Emotional Rewards of Group Victimhood
Collective victimhood feels empowering at first. It transforms personal pain into a larger moral purpose. What was once chaos becomes coherence.
Being part of a group that has “suffered together” gives life meaning and creates unity. It offers protection from isolation. There’s comfort in saying, “We’re not crazy; we’ve been wronged.”
In social movements, this dynamic can quickly become a badge of belonging — a way to prove loyalty to the cause. Those who display the most outrage, or carry the most visible wounds, often gain the highest moral status.
Psychologists call this competitive victimhood: when groups begin to compete for recognition as the most wronged. The greater the suffering, the greater the virtue. But moral status can become addictive. Once a group learns that pain equals virtue, it begins to search for more pain — and when real injustices run out, it may start to manufacture offense to sustain its moral authority.
It’s a strange paradox: the more a group celebrates its wounds, the less it can afford to heal them.
3. Biases that Keep the Wound Open
Victim thinking doesn’t just change beliefs — it changes perception itself. It amplifies cognitive biases that keep the wound raw and prevent healing.
Confirmation bias: Interpreting every disagreement or policy change as proof of oppression. The mind filters the world for evidence of persecution.
Attribution bias: Assuming malice rather than misunderstanding — reading intent where there may be none.
Availability bias: Because the media highlights what shocks and wounds, stories of cruelty stay vivid in our minds while quiet acts of goodwill fade from view. We remember every injustice, not because it’s most common, but because it’s most visible.
Moral typecasting: Once a group is labeled “the victim,” society struggles to see it as capable of harm — while the supposed “oppressor” becomes incapable of innocence.
This last bias deserves a closer look.
Social psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner discovered that people intuitively divide the world into moral types: those who act (moral agents) and those who suffer (moral patients). Once someone is cast in one role, our minds tend to freeze them there.
That means when a group is seen as a victim, their actions are interpreted through a moral filter that excuses wrongdoing. Their pain becomes proof of virtue — and even when they cause harm, observers tend to explain it away as justified or defensive.
Conversely, those seen as oppressors carry a kind of permanent moral stain. Even their good deeds are reinterpreted as self-serving or manipulative.
The tragedy is that this bias prevents genuine empathy in both directions. It denies accountability to those labeled as victims and compassion to those labeled as villains. In the end, everyone’s humanity gets flattened into a single moral role — and the cycle of grievance stays alive.
4. When Empathy Becomes a Weapon
Empathy is one of humanity’s most precious traits. But when victimhood becomes sacred, even empathy can be weaponized.
Claims of harm begin to override discussions of truth. Feelings become the final arbiter of morality. The question shifts from “Is this accurate?” to “Does this offend?”
The result is what might be called moral coercion: when guilt replaces persuasion and compassion becomes a tool of control. People censor themselves not because they’re wrong, but because they fear being seen as cruel.
You can see this dynamic almost anywhere today — in classrooms, offices, or online. A teacher hesitates to discuss a controversial historical event because one student might feel “unsafe.” A coworker swallows an honest disagreement during a diversity training, not because they’ve changed their mind, but because they dread being labeled insensitive. On social media, someone offers a mild counterpoint and is flooded with moral outrage until they apologize for the sin of questioning the narrative.
In each case, guilt or shame becomes a weapon. The emotional threat of being branded heartless silences discussion more effectively than any argument could. And so compassion, meant to connect us, begins to control us.
Ironically, the groups that appear most powerless often become the most influential, because they wield the moral authority of suffering. When pain becomes proof of virtue, disagreement starts to look like aggression.
It’s a subtle but devastating inversion: empathy, meant to heal division, becomes a tool that enforces it.
5. The Emotional Toll on the Group
Living inside a collective grievance feels purposeful, but it’s emotionally draining. Righteous anger brings a surge of meaning — a sense of clarity and mission — but like any stimulant, it requires constant renewal.
A group addicted to outrage cannot rest. It needs a steady supply of offenses, real or imagined, to keep its story alive. When none appear, it begins to see insult in the ordinary and oppression in mere difference.
Without new conflict, the group’s identity weakens. This is why peace, paradoxically, can feel threatening to movements built on pain. Reconciliation robs them of their reason to exist.
The emotional cost is high: anxiety, exhaustion, paranoia, and isolation. The group’s members live in a permanent state of alert, bonded by fear rather than love.
6. How Collective Victimhood Divides Society
The tragedy of group grievance is that it unites within but divides between. Shared suffering bonds members of the in-group, but it hardens their hearts toward outsiders. Empathy becomes conditional — reserved only for those who share the same scar.
Once compassion is limited to “our people,” understanding dies. Dialogue collapses. Each side becomes trapped in its own moral narrative, convinced that it alone is righteous.
The cultural result is polarization — a society where everyone talks about justice while practicing vengeance, and where reconciliation feels like betrayal.
In such a climate, even kindness can be misinterpreted as manipulation. Every gesture is filtered through suspicion. Healing becomes nearly impossible because the wound has become the identity.
7. Toward a Healthier Collective Story
The way out is not to deny injustice but to transcend it. Nations, communities, and movements can honor their suffering without making it their defining story.
That transformation begins with language.
Saying “We have suffered” keeps us anchored in the past.
Saying “We have endured” honors the same pain but adds strength.
The first sentence describes injury; the second describes resilience.
The difference seems small, but psychologically it’s immense — one keeps the wound open, the other begins to heal it.
Healthy cultures, like healthy people, move from grievance to growth. They tell stories not just of what was lost but of how they rose. They stop competing for sympathy and start competing for excellence.
Final Word
Victimhood once served a sacred purpose — to awaken empathy for the mistreated. It was meant to open our hearts, to remind us of our shared humanity and the moral duty to protect the vulnerable. When a culture witnesses suffering and responds with compassion, something profoundly good happens: justice grows, cruelty is restrained, and dignity is restored.
But somewhere along the way, that sacred purpose was replaced by something transactional. When victimhood becomes a currency, empathy turns into a market, and suffering becomes a brand.
You can see it in the way public life now rewards outrage and emotional display. A single personal story of harm, once told for healing, can now become a platform — drawing attention, sympathy, and sometimes even profit.
Organizations compete to showcase their pain as proof of virtue; individuals learn that expressing offense earns social status; corporations adopt slogans of solidarity not from conscience, but because compassion has become good marketing.
Imagine a town square where people once gathered to comfort the wounded. Over time, the square becomes a stage. The wounded are still there, but now they must keep their wounds visible, even open, because the crowd has learned to applaud pain more than recovery. The very empathy that was meant to heal now demands performance.
When compassion becomes currency, its value declines. What once flowed freely from the heart is now rationed, manipulated, and traded for attention or power.
The true mark of strength is not how loudly we proclaim our pain, but how gracefully we move beyond it. Real empathy — the kind that changes lives — begins when we stop spending suffering and start transforming it.
Our challenge now, as individuals and as a culture, is to remember that compassion and accountability must grow together — or both will die apart.
In the next and final part of this series, we’ll explore how modern institutions — academia, media, and politics — have learned to reward and monetize victimhood, and what that means for the future of honest conversation and human resilience.
Whenever I hear about what is arguably the best way to read manga online that supports the manga industry in North America, I usually get one answer - Viz’s Shonen Jump app. The app is promoted by almost all manga industry/press/bloggers/podcasters in the West as THE option to read manga legally.
The Shonen Jump app has almost every series from the Japanese version of Jump along with a few other Jump titles published in other Jump-related magazines. They come out the same release day as the magazines do in Japan. You get all of this for about $2 a month.
It’s an amazing deal and yet I’m somewhat concerned about Shonen Jump being treated as the answer to satisfy one’s digital manga needs.
There are a few manga folks that feel readers have to be exposed more to other legal manga sources besides Jump. I have to agree with those people.
Just because it’s the prevalent option doesn’t mean it will satisfy everyone’s needs. Not everyone likes material from Shonen Jump or shonen in general. There’s other services that don’t get as much attention due to lack of promotional resources. I also realize that certain notable manga services are terrible (Crunchyroll Manga being one of them).
Why is it that people talk about the US edition Shonen Jump like that’s the best option to read cheap legal manga when it may not exactly be the case? I think I’ll discuss this by talking about how cognitive biases play a role.
It could come down to salience. Shonen Jump series are prominent among comics and manga fandom. Many series from Jump are recognizable to fans all across the world. What anime/manga fan doesn’t know about One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, etc.? All of those series were/are published in the pages of Jump. They’re also easy to remember due to constant exposure via anime and merchandise.
Salience is a notable cognitive bias because we usually recognize certain features that make something worthwhile without considering a larger picture. For Jump, it can be the price point and the amount of content available for that price point. The larger picture being that there’s other excellent manga worth reading outside of Jump. This isn’t to place blame on Jump advocates; the mind can make you think more about what’s directly apparent compared to what’s more realistic.
Another cognitive bias with regards to “Jump is your answer to every digital manga need!” is the availability heuristic. What this bias does is that it makes you overestimate the importance of any information that’s available to you. Because of how available Jump is, any advocate with this bias might say something like “Oh, you can read Jump online. A lot of my friends read it as their legit option. It’s got what you want.” Because Jump is read by “everyone,” it must be important. As we sometimes know, importance can be different for certain manga readers.
One final cognitive bias that I think that applies here is the bandwagon effect. If multiple people believe in something, you start to feel the same. I sense this with Jump. When you have so many manga folks tout Jump like it’s the best digital manga experience today, the people around them start to tout it too. The bandwagon effect is very associated with sports, with regards to successful teams and casual fans flocking to them and leaving them when the joyride is over. It can be harmless at times, but the problem with the bandwagon is that it leads to groupthink. Groupthink can lead to people ignoring valuable outside opinions and feedback in favor of what their own circles say.
I love what Viz has done with their Shonen Jump service and I know it’s not enough. I do take Shonen Jump for what it is - a mainstream gateway into a world that leads to possibilities for manga readers to see what’s out there. While there is open variety (Jump today is fantastic with its current lineup), it also feels closed due to how much freedom one can take. Some Shonen Jump titles start off well and end up falling flat as they get longer. This felt very apparent with regards to how the popularity of Food Wars (which had a great premise) fell off a cliff after a certain point.
Perhaps the next step (or even a better idea) is how to address the cognitive bias of manga readers and help them get past their own form of groupthink. There’s no guarantee that many casual online manga fans will read more than just Jump or any “mainstream” manga titles in general when so much emphasis is placed on Jump. I wonder if that’s enough for an industry that’s still facing a lot of problems. A majority of legal digital manga aren’t exactly budget-friendly. It will take the right manga service provider to give a user-friendly outlet that delivers an even wider variety of titles for manga fans itching for alternative works. Some folks are trying and it will be a process.
Dealing with any kind of bias is never easy. At the very least, acknowledging them is a kind of “jump” that can fill someone with the same principles Shonen Jump preaches. Friendship, hard work, and victory all mean something with reading and promoting noteworthy titles that lie outside of one’s own comfort zone.
If restaurants in my home city of Seattle were to remain open, no one would be forced to frequent them and expose themselves to the associated risk. All concerned—proprietors, workers, and customers—would have a choice in that. On the other hand, the minimum-wage server who is laid off or the business owner who can’t cover his costs has no means of protecting herself.
And yet, most people are very accepting of the way governments are acting. It is understandable why that is so, and the reason is simple; it is that enough of us believe, “if we allow people to make those choices, the virus is more likely to kill me.”
Perhaps. But the extent to which that is true depends mostly on you. So how about the following for fairer and more proportionate?
If I’m more scared about the certainty of losing my livelihood by closing my restaurant or on account of my employer doing so, then let me go to work. If I’m more scared about the small probability of losing my life by eating or working at my local restaurant, then, well, let me stay at home.
For sure, people must be given the best information available to weigh and compare those risks from day to day—but why would we remove their ability to do so when lives and livelihoods at stake and everyone’s circumstances are so very different?
That information would include the very low probability of receiving treatment when hospital beds are full—so you'll be clear about the risk you'd be taking by going to a commercial location as either worker or customer. Even under near-draconian measures (and that’s not too tough a word for policy that puts tens of thousands of people out of work and potentially makes them homeless), you probably won’t be getting care when you need it because there may not be enough hospital beds available.
So why not give people information about all of these factors and risks and let them decide for themselves and their loved ones, including their children?
By not doing so, we are on a very slippery slope.
You may scoff at everything here with an, “easy for you to say” under your breath. And you would be entirely right: it is very easy for me to say.
But my point is that I—and you—should at least get a say when the stakes are this high—and dying from a virus is, still, a rather unlikely way of losing the gamble.
A say and a choice, that is. Morality and liberty demand both those for the simple reason that leaving me with my choice doesn’t take yours away from you and doesn’t condemn you to death. Not even close.
If, on the other hand, you would take both of those away from me and everyone else, then you’d better be able to look in the eye the minimum-wage single mother and tell her it was worth her losing her job so that you could reduce your chance of dying from an illness by fractions of a percentage point.
And if people like me go out for a meal, and contract something nasty, you can scoff at me again as I am left to suffer at home because there aren’t enough beds at the hospital…
… Not that that would make much difference to me if I’d lost my health insurance—and my roof—with my job and my liberty.
Poverty, by just about any measure, has declined worldwide in recent decades. Whatever the reasons, this is an extremely important recent historical fact.
Now that you know this fact, you are among the elite in the world, at least on this one important topic. When asked in surveys what has happened to global poverty in the past 20 years, only 1% of those surveyed worldwide knew it was cut in half! Another 12% thought it had declined by about 25%, but 18% thought it had stayed the same and 70% thought it had increased!
Before you get too smug, please be aware that there were large differences across countries in knowledge about global poverty reduction. While overall 13% knew that poverty had declined, this figure was as high as 50% in China and 27% in India, but only about 8% in the US and Germany.
This difference between countries is probably partly due to “availability bias,” where people tend to use readily available examples to extrapolate to the whole population. But it’s also likely a result of “pessimistic bias,” which Bryan Caplan uses as one of his four main biases affecting voter knowledge in democracies.
In other words, people in China know that poverty is declining, because it really is declining rapidly in their country and most Chinese people know it firsthand. In the US, pessimism dominates, perhaps due to the long shadow of the Great Recession. The good news for you? By reading this article, you now know more than over 90% of Americans!
Jeremy Horpedahl, “What Most Americans Don't Know about Extreme Poverty”
`White hat bias' (WHB) (bias leading to distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends) is documented via quantitative data and anecdotal evidence from the research record regarding the postulated predisposing and ...
Scientific dialogue is dependent on fair and open presentation of data and evidence, yet recent years have raised concerns about bias in research practice. We present data and examples pertinent to a particular bias, a `white hat bias' (WHB), which we define to be bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends.
...
Our analysis (Fig 1) shows a clear inverse association between study precision and association magnitude. This PB hallmark suggests that studies with statistically significant NSB findings are more likely to be published than are non-statistically significant ones. Interestingly, this bias appears to be present only for non-industry-funded research, suggesting that non-industry-funded scientists tend not to publish their non-significant associations in this area.
''We empathize more with Anne Frank than with a similar girl who was immediately arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Compared to other detentions, Anne Frank’s is an exception. Of course, the availability bias also plays a role. Anne Frank’s story is known worldwide through her diary. Most other detentions are forgotten and therefore not available to us.''
