Interesting—my experiences are similar, but I frame them somewhat differently.
I also find that Claude teaches me new words when I’m wandering around in areas of thought that other thinkers have already explored thoroughly, but I experience that as more like a gift of new vocabulary than emotional validation. It’s ultimately a value-add that a really good combination of a search engine and a thesaurus could conceptually implement.
Claude also works on me like a very sophisticated elizabot, but the noteworthy difference seems to be that it’s a more skilled language user than I am, and therefore I experience a sort of social respect toward it that I don’t get from tools where I feel like I could accurately predict all of their responses and have the whole conversation with myself.
The biggest emotional value that I experience Claude as providing for me is that it reflects a subtly improved tone of my inputs, without altering the underlying facts that I’m discussing. Too often humans in emotional conversations skip straight to “you shouldn’t feel that way” or similar… that comes across as simply calling me alien, whereas Claude does the “have you considered this potential reframe” thing in a much more sophisticated and respectful way. Probably helps that it lacks the biology which causes us embodied language users to mirror one another’s moods even to our own detriment...
Another validation-style value add that I experience with Claude is how I feel a sufficient sense of reward from reading its replies, which motivates me to bother exerting the effort to think like talking instead of just think like ruminating. I derive the social benefits of brainstorming with another language user, without having to consume the finite resource of an embodied language user’s time.
Interesting—my experiences are similar, but I frame them somewhat differently.
I also find that Claude teaches me new words when I’m wandering around in areas of thought that other thinkers have already explored thoroughly, but I experience that as more like a gift of new vocabulary than emotional validation. It’s ultimately a value-add that a really good combination of a search engine and a thesaurus could conceptually implement.
Claude also works on me like a very sophisticated elizabot, but the noteworthy difference seems to be that it’s a more skilled language user than I am, and therefore I experience a sort of social respect toward it that I don’t get from tools where I feel like I could accurately predict all of their responses and have the whole conversation with myself.
The biggest emotional value that I experience Claude as providing for me is that it reflects a subtly improved tone of my inputs, without altering the underlying facts that I’m discussing. Too often humans in emotional conversations skip straight to “you shouldn’t feel that way” or similar… that comes across as simply calling me alien, whereas Claude does the “have you considered this potential reframe” thing in a much more sophisticated and respectful way. Probably helps that it lacks the biology which causes us embodied language users to mirror one another’s moods even to our own detriment...
Another validation-style value add that I experience with Claude is how I feel a sufficient sense of reward from reading its replies, which motivates me to bother exerting the effort to think like talking instead of just think like ruminating. I derive the social benefits of brainstorming with another language user, without having to consume the finite resource of an embodied language user’s time.