You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it • Hacker News Board

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#251

Post by ctrw » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:16 AM UTC

y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

The idea that you can understand what experiences produce what behaviours is as much crazier than the idea you can manually tune the weights of gpt4 and get better results.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#252

Post by mchaver » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:17 AM UTC

piloto_ciego wrote: post #185

ben_w wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? My tongue-in-cheek answer here is: Correct, badly, and it looks like the obsessive-compulsive desire to check social media and/or the news.

Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its c…

I think another part is that materialism, determinism and science have (seemingly) given us great understanding and control of our environment and overturned lots of superstitious and erroneous ideas that society has. So if you accept materialism and determinism as the base of the universe and nature of things you naturally arrive at the conclusion that there is no free will.

I have a hunch that the universe is more complicated than that and might likely be beyond human understanding, but maybe that's just another superstitious belief. Regardless, we should keep using Science to explore because it is the best model we have so far and continue to use Philosophy to question things.

Personally I feel that I have free will and understanding of my emotions gives me more free will. Even if I am wrong, I prefer living in a non-free will universe and believing in free will than living in a free will universe and not believing in free will. In the former case that would just be my destiny, haha.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#253

Post by coffeeblack » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:20 AM UTC

Just like any other LLM.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#254

Post by light_hue_1 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:31 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #74

y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…

> Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves

Even a brief look out your window will convince you this cannot possibly be true.

How many people have a different religion than their parents? How many Christians from Iowa have kids that decide they're actually Hindu? Just about zero.

Can you tell where someone is from based on how they dress? Heck yes. If they were making up their mind on their own you couldn't.

The likelihood you'll go into the military is far higher if other people in your family are in the military. 1% of Americans serve at all. But 60% of people who serve have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who serves.

We could go on endlessly.

The idea that we're largely a product of ourselves is absurd. How many top physics were born in Eastern Europe be Africa? Do people in Africa genetically hate physics? No. But you're largely a product of your environment.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#255

Post by AvAn12 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:33 AM UTC

This gets to some of the difference between human intelligence and LLM training. The machine remembers everything verbatim (plus a vector representation). Most people have faulty memory but somehow make a deeper encoding of the impact a book or life experience had. Agree there is some analogy between vector encoding vs the mind’s representation — but it’s a loose analogy. LLMs and search etc are useful tools for sure - but definitely don’t have anything like human level deeper (yet faulty) intelligence. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious… cheers

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#256

Post by vasco » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:38 AM UTC

Ghexor wrote: post #248

vasco wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can answer all the questions with the same answer (quoted from my comment above): > Advertising exists (..) for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something. Your questions are just requiring more sophisticated answers that will all boil down to that. What you say is "unnecessary funny mascots or catchy music" is brand awareness which is still "letting other people know I exist and I ca…

I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed. Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in ev…

I agree investigation is worthwhile. As an adult, being aware of techniques like fake sense of urgency or scarcity, playing on your maslow needs for belonging and self-actualisation etc are things you should be aware, to develop a better sense of "smell" for bullshit.

I don't think any of this is new though, I'm pretty sure the local Roman seller of beads and nice dresses did the same things to their customers on the posters they put on buildings and the cries they shouted in the square, or olive oil salespeople using gladiators to have spectators buy that specific kind of olive oil. You can look these examples up because they are real.

The technology and mediums change, but human emotions and our reactions to them change on a scale of many more years than only a few thousands.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#257

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:39 AM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #104

nyokodo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.

Existence of mental illness or troubles makes me doubt that. What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ? If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behavio…

> If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?

Your brain chemistry is part of this will, though.

> science now knows that changing behavior is hard

I don't think science knows things. And while changing behaviour is hard, and much harder for some than others, it still doesn't mean that the total system that makes up your mind, including biological predispositions, is not your will.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#258

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:41 AM UTC

nikkwong wrote: post #121

nyokodo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience. > we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it. No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined…

I sort of responded to this idea in another comment, but again. How can you take ‘personal credit’ (as if you could have acted otherwise) for choosing to change your behavior? Isn’t that an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow?

> an idea that also just appears in consciousness that is, for inexplicable reasons, more compelling than other ideas at the time so that is the choice that your brain reasons to follow

This seems to be an idiosyncratic definition of free will.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#259

Post by 7thaccount » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:42 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #245

daniel_reetz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. The experiences that changed and benefited me most were least predictable. As a result, I try to manage experiences less, and choose the unknown more. But in the spirit of what you've said, I try to avoid doing dumb, damaging, or boring things twice.

If you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you will learn the things you never knew you never knew.

But can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

In all seriousness, I liked that line you quoted in the song. I wonder if there is a literary term for that repetition. It's not alliteration I don't think as the words themselves repeat.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#260

Post by vasco » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 10:44 AM UTC

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #180

vasco wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without advertising in the world, it'd be a much poorer place. Advertising exists for more than a thousand years and it's the only way for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.

I'm sorry but that's bullshit. Advertising is carte blanche mind control. Markets and products can easily exist without advertising. In fact, they're better. You go to markets, and you have curators. Advertising outside of a market should be not only illegal but culturally frowned upon as a root ethic.

> Markets and products can easily exist without advertising

Source needed - seeing I don't know any company that doesn't advertise in some shape or form. The ones that I found that claim they don't, actually do advertise and use the "we don't advertise" as further advertisements. By definition I think it'd be hard to find companies that truly don't advertise, so maybe you know of some that are successful but don't do it?