Maralyn Beck

Passionate • Persistent • Foster Care Systems Reform Advocate @NMChildFirst • Optimist • @AspenInstitute Civil Society Fellow • Nuanced opinions my own.🌱🌶️🐾

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

"Foster youth deserve more than survival stories. They deserve systems that work." 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Thank you @TheImprintNews for lifting up op-ed by Jennifer Myers.

https://t.co/f4qA8sgcK8

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

“In closing, Sasse recommended St. John’s graduating class adopt five habits: Read well, work hard, rest consistently, travel seriously and build relationships.”

https://t.co/UZ5aROGwjI

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

READ THAT AGAIN. Under the New Mexico's Governor's 2025 CARA-fix directive: VULNERABLE. BABIES. HAVE. STOPPED. DYING.

That's it. That's the ONLY that matters. Fixed a *deadly* policy.

SAVED LIVES.

PREVENTED DEATHS.

𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐄𝐋𝐒𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒.

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

The bottom line? “No substance-exposed newborn child under the directive has died,” Thompson wrote.

👏👏👏👏

“The directive is working as intended and is keeping babies alive. Before the directive, too many substance-exposed newborn babies were dying, and others struggled to live,” he added.

https://t.co/PRzWsPjvIa

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

“Now we’re providing a protected environment for infants during their most vulnerable developmental period while keeping a pathway open for parents to engage with services and substance treatment.

thank you.

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

The bottom line? “No substance-exposed newborn child under the directive has died,” Thompson wrote.

👏👏👏👏

“The directive is working as intended and is keeping babies alive. Before the directive, too many substance-exposed newborn babies were dying, and others struggled to live,” he added.

https://t.co/PRzWsPjvIa

[Santa Fe New Mexican @thenewmexican]

CYFD workers suspected of speaking to The New Mexican became targets of retaliatory investigations and escalating harassment after an article was published in mid-March about the state agency's toxic work environments at multiple county offices. https://t.co/PqmGMrI7GQ

[Women's Public Leadership Network @WPLNetwork]

If you're looking to grow as a leader, these convos are a great place to begin! ⬇️

Our WPLN Fellow Alayna Ruiz put together a list of conversations (ft. @MaralynB, @valeriedowling, & @betsyankney) that she'd recommend to any current or future leader.

🔗 https://t.co/lWUXUP5Zel

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

Gardening 🌱behavioral activation🌱 has changed my life!!!

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Shayadjinn @Shayadjinn1]

This is so sad. The way foster parents are treated does not help this system work, either. I have so many stories. Poor kids. ☹️

[Emily @putnamhornstein]

My latest w/Sarah Font. "States fund voluntary family resource centers that offer diapers and gift cards, while leaving child protection agencies understaffed and undertrained." https://t.co/hamtxWGrNR

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Amazing: LA schools will eliminate personal devices in K and 1st grade, and limit use in grades 2-5, and give parents more options. I think this will catch on nationally:

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

“I wish that they would quit lying to the public,” the CYFD employee said.

“They say, oh, there’s no office stays. OK, they might not be sleeping in the office,” the worker said, but the situation is no less destructive. #CYFDcrisis #nmleg

https://t.co/PRd6qL0XzH

[Naomi Schaefer Riley @NaomiSRiley]

"Safety is the standard,
not the aspiration." Excited to welcome a new organization focused on child safety to this space. Happy launch day, @aly_brodsky https://t.co/zX4OaiAzmE

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

"In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college."

— Joseph Sobran

[Steve Schale @steveschale]

This is so good. The art of talking to people you disagree with —>

[Representative Joy Garratt, NM HD29 @joyousgarratt]

Lots of thoughtful reporting and opinion pieces in today's @abqjournal. Thank you @maralynbeck for your take on @CYFDNM staying under the Governor's authority. https://t.co/cHu9PWidbe

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

🩷🩷🩷

[Naomi Schaefer Riley @NaomiSRiley]

"I’m not afforded the luxury of an academic view of public safety. I have to have a real view of public safety.” Wish others would learn this lesson faster. https://t.co/F2ozSq2G4i @robkhenderson @AEICosm @IWF

[Maralyn Beck @MaralynB]

“All the shelters have gotten this direction repeatedly, that we are required to accept this referral, and we’re required to keep the child,” said one shelter manager who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by CYFD. “If we call and say they are not safe, or other youth are not safe at our facility, the workers say, well, you have to keep them. So we will not come pick them up.”

https://t.co/0weaRw3Tcv

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

In 2016 Norway gave every 5-year-old child an iPad.

Within a few years, Norway's reading scores plummeted and dropped below the OECD average.

They ranked dead last out of 65 countries.

Now Norway is spending millions of dollars to reverse this trend and get people reading.