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Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

thebullshitmachines.com

211–220 of 652 posts

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#211
I'm uncomfortable with the use of profanity as a core element of this campaign branding, especially given that it seems to be an educational outreach effort. While this seems targeted at college age and above, I think it would be highly relevant content for a teen audience as well. While I swear in privacy on occasion I think it has no place in the classroom. I really don't care for it in the workplace either but I grant that private enterprises can have their own culture.

It is frustrating because I agree with most of the content and the need for informed debate on the topic. It is a bit like my reaction to reading Cory Doctorow: I agree with his politics but really dislike the hamfisted way he packages his advocacy in the form of action adventures. As if the merits of his arguments need to be packaged in cotton candy to be consumed, and there is an undercurrent of self-promotion and personal branding that feels suss.

Probably all a "me" problem with associations built up over time from seeing snake oil being packaged using a similar playbook. If you have to sell your message by dressing it up with scroll effects and provocative offensive language you've already lost me.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical truths based on observation of reality is the basis for science. Statistical truth based on the text on the internet is the basis for something else, and I would personally not like to call whatever that is science, or any truths established this way "ground truths".

What year did the Normans invade England? What's Newton's second law? Who was the last czar of Russia? How many moons does Jupiter have? I bet you "know" a lot of those facts not because you have observed them empirically, but because you read about them in books. And in fact, almost all scientists rely on reading for nearly everything they know about science, including nearly everything they know about their own spe…

Yup, and importantly, the correct answer to those is, in anyone's personal learning experience, almost always just what the authority figures in their lives (parents, teachers, peers they respect, or textbooks themselves) would accept as the correct answer!

"Consensus reality" works so well for us most of the time, that we habitually "substitite the Moon for the finger pointing at the Moon" without realizing it.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#213
post #196

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all. Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty…

Craving "authenticity" is somewhere very high up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. a luxury. That a lot of people do not care much for it is not a sign of moral failing but of having bigger fish to fry.

I think it'd fall somewhere close to a "social" need, i.e. right smack in the middle of Maslow's hierarchy.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#214

"The LLMs have no ground truth" claim (around chapter 2) that's core to the "bullshit machines" argument is itself wrong. Of course LLMs have ground truth. What do the authors think here, that the text in training corpus is random ? Hint: it isn't. Real conversations are anything but random. There's a lot of information hidden in "statistical ordering of the words", because the distribution is not arbitrary . Statist…

Statistical truths based on observation of reality is the basis for science. Statistical truth based on the text on the internet is the basis for something else, and I would personally not like to call whatever that is science, or any truths established this way "ground truths".

> personally not like to call whatever that is science

A counterargument written pre-LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#215
post #211

I'm uncomfortable with the use of profanity as a core element of this campaign branding, especially given that it seems to be an educational outreach effort. While this seems targeted at college age and above, I think it would be highly relevant content for a teen audience as well. While I swear in privacy on occasion I think it has no place in the classroom. I really don't care for it in the workplace either but I g…

I assume that the use of the word "bullshit" on this site is at least in part informed by "On Bullshit,"[1] which is a pretty common undergraduate reading.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#216
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic produce isn’t a good example because it’s a dodgy poorly defined concept and it’s not clear that it’s either better for you or better tasting. The thing about art is this: art is a message from a human to another human. If I want art I want it to be that. I don’t want a numerical average of all past messages, which is what LLMs and diffusion models create. I also don’t want randomness or gimmickry, which is w…

I didn't want to hijack the thread too much but yeah, organic farming was not originally about better for the consumer. The origin of organic farming methods was about taking care of the land and the ecosystems in which farming happens. The end products happened to be healthier, in some cases, because of reduced usage of chemicals known to be harmful resulted in less of them in the product at retail.

Perhaps, but then the meaning of the word is in how it's used (something that, if more people truly understood, would cut the amount of dismissing LLMs as "bullshit machines" and "stochastic parrots" by half).

"Organic farming" may have initially been about sustainability, but the result correlated well enough with healthy food - and even more so with the naturalistic fallacy-fueled "healthy food" fad, that the latter application took over as it became a market niche. The niche being itself based more on a fallacy than reality is why "organic food" is such a bullshit fest it is - one product might be genuinely healthier, another is just worse and also ruins the land because it's sprayed with a nasty set of chemicals that are more "natural" than their strictly safer "modern" alternatives...

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#217

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all. Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty…

[deleted]

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#218
post #211

I'm uncomfortable with the use of profanity as a core element of this campaign branding, especially given that it seems to be an educational outreach effort. While this seems targeted at college age and above, I think it would be highly relevant content for a teen audience as well. While I swear in privacy on occasion I think it has no place in the classroom. I really don't care for it in the workplace either but I g…

[deleted]

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#219

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all. Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty…

[deleted]

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#220

Do you feel that you may be being a bit provocative by calling LLM's 'bullshit machines'? I understand the frustration as I've been bullshitted by these models just as much as the next programmer, but surely with recent advancements in RAG and reasoning, they're not just 'bullshit machines' at this point, are they?

Or are they modern day oracles? The full title is inclusive and invites consideration. Besides, how many different types of models are there? How are they used? For freely available ones made accessible to the general public via interfaces, when were they last updated? Do the interface implementors even care or was it a simple project to make money via ads and microtransactions? This is a new area of media literacy a…

> Or are they modern day oracles?

Neither, which is probably why the parent commenter considers it provocative.

"A bullshitter either doesn't know the truth, or doesn't care. They are just trying to be persuasive."

In any case, this kind of anthropomorphization is definitely bullshit.

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