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The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

win-vector.com

121–130 of 148 posts

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#121
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the inverse?

there exists a setting which will work for all your test points. The caveat of the author is (I think) that if you have a task, you collect a set of points (questions) on which you will test this task. Then you tune your setting (prompt) to start working for your test point (questions). After that procedure, you do not know if that prompt solves the original task. You might have overfitted to your test points. And by…

You can go as far as claiming that it's true for your colleagues as well! They've solved their piece of the job so far, but what evidence do you have that they will keep solving them in future? It's all just speculation!

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#122
post #79

In my opinion it's a weak take that only got so upvoted and commented on hacker news because it has the existential and universal logical quantifier symbols in the title and also because it uses the chiasmus rhetoric device both in the title and at the end of the article. The argument is that several technologies don't work 'out of the box' and you have to tweak their settings for each problem that you face, and that…

NB: This isn't an example of chiasmus.

I wonder if there is a name for this. Antimetabole comes to mind but that usually requires two clauses. I suppose it is a "chiastic pattern" which is a more broad definition, which I believe also applies to smaller patterns although I have only seen it used for larger patterns like chapters.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#123

>>> Build a system that solves problems, but with an important user-facing control. ... >>> Convince the user that it is their job to find a instantiation or setting of this control to make the system work for their tasks. By golly, you just described playing the cello.

I swear to God, I have suffered more playing cello than dealing with pointers in C

[deleted]

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, but `$ yes "a cat is an animal"` does (if you know how to interpret it)

If it requires interpretation, than it is the "yes+human" system that has the knowledge. What really happened here is that a human wrote down, "a cat is an animal," and then another human read it, understood it, and believed it. And so the knowledge moved from one human to another. `yes` was only a conduit for that information to travel through.

>was only a conduit

If something was a conduit for knowledge wouldn't it make sense that it would have at some point contained the knowledge? The knowledge is stored into it by one human and extracted by another human.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it requires interpretation, than it is the "yes+human" system that has the knowledge. What really happened here is that a human wrote down, "a cat is an animal," and then another human read it, understood it, and believed it. And so the knowledge moved from one human to another. `yes` was only a conduit for that information to travel through.

>was only a conduit If something was a conduit for knowledge wouldn't it make sense that it would have at some point contained the knowledge? The knowledge is stored into it by one human and extracted by another human.

Absolutely you can store knowledge in text. You can store quite a bit of knowledge in a book for instance, but the book doesn't have any beliefs and doesn't know anything. Whether a sufficiently complex Markov chain or ANN can have beliefs, I don't know but I'm skeptical that these ANNs do in particular.

It's ability to produce text containing true statements isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that it has beliefs, and it's easy to find cases where it contradicts itself (eg, if you play around with the wording you can find a prompt where it tells you that solving the trolley problem is a matter of harming the fewest people but proposes a solution that harms the most people). I take that as an indication it's primarily regurgitating text and rearranging the prompt rather than applying knowledge (which, to be clear, is useful for a number of tasks).

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#127
post #52

My biggest takeaway from the article is my new favorite word: cryptomorphic, meaning equivalent, but not obviously so.

I'm no linguist but it seems to me that that word doesn't really work for that definition. It sounds like it should pertain to hidden form, not hidden similar form, like say, cryptoisomorphic .

You're right there. It's amusing to me because I suspect it is difficult or impossible to meaningfully define "obvious". In my head, it matches "cryptozoology", where the "crypto" denotation kind of includes "pseudoscience".

But also "hidden shape" has a loose implication of "hidden equivalent shape".

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Significantly economically impactful in some cases- obvious examples of call centers and first-line customer support. Is it that obvious? Yesterday I had a trivial but uncommon issue with my pharmacy. I reached out to them online - their chatbot was the only channel available. I tried, over the course of 20 minutes and 3 restarted sessions, to communicate an issue that a human would have been able to respond to in…

Do you have any reason to believe that the Chatbot was GPT3.5 or GPT4 based?

I don't think so, I assume it's some more dated ML approach -- my point is moreso that it's not obvious that it's a good solution for this problem yet.

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#129

>>> Build a system that solves problems, but with an important user-facing control. ... >>> Convince the user that it is their job to find a instantiation or setting of this control to make the system work for their tasks. By golly, you just described playing the cello.

I swear to God, I have suffered more playing cello than dealing with pointers in C

Maybe that’s the key to raise successful programming kids- introduce them to a hobby that is worse than programming and let them switch later

Re: The Sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ Scam

#130
post #29

Are compilers a scam as well? There exists a program every problem you have, you just have to find the code.

Not at the moment. but there was a time that some thought that we should be able to produce a general purpose programming language, to solve every problem. One size fits all.

It took more than 40 years to realize that was never going to be.

There's a joke about that in commit strip:

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...

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