asking GPT-4 about humans

I've asked this to GPT-4: Imagine you want to explain to a new AI why human behaviour is so irrational. Here his answer:

Hello, new AI! I'd like to help you understand why human behavior can sometimes seem irrational. Humans are complex beings, and there are several factors that contribute to their seemingly irrational behavior. Let's break it down into a few key points:

1. Cognitive biases: Humans are prone to cognitive biases, which are systematic patterns of deviation from normative behavior or rationality in judgment. These biases can influence their decision-making processes, leading to irrational choices. Examples of cognitive biases include confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and availability heuristic.
2. Emotional influences: Human emotions play a significant role in shaping their behavior. Emotions such as fear, love, anger, and happiness can lead people to make decisions that might not be optimal or rational from a purely logical standpoint.
3. Limited cognitive resources: Humans have limited cognitive resources, which means that they can't process all available information or consider every possible outcome when making decisions. As a result, they rely on heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to simplify complex problems. While these shortcuts can be useful, they can also lead to irrational decisions.
4. Social factors: Humans are social animals, and their behavior is often influenced by the people around them. They may conform to group norms or follow the opinions of authority figures, even if it leads to irrational behavior.
5. Evolutionary roots: Some seemingly irrational behaviors have evolutionary roots, as they may have conferred survival or reproductive advantages in the past. For example, humans have a tendency to be risk-averse, which may have helped their ancestors avoid dangerous situations.
6. Incomplete or inaccurate information: Humans often make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. They may not have access to all relevant facts, or they might misunderstand or misinterpret the information they do have. This can lead to irrational decisions.
7. Personal values and beliefs: Human behavior is influenced by their personal values and beliefs, which can be shaped by culture, upbringing, and personal experiences. These values and beliefs can sometimes conflict with rational decision-making processes, leading to irrational behavior.

Understanding these factors can help you make sense of human irrationality and better predict and respond to their behaviors.

...mmm not too bad. The bolding of some words is from me. Just so that the main points better show up.

Looks like GPT-4 can generate text that mimics a good understanding of human flaws. I write mimic, because GPT-4 does not understand things. It has no concepts. It's only a language model trained on millions of documents that can, after that training, figure out the most probable output given your input.

So now, we could ask GPT-4, what humans could do to improve themselves. Or, to be more accurate, we could query the most probable output to the following input: "Knowing this, what could humans do to improve themselves?".