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People are just as bad as my LLMs

wilsoniumite.com

41–50 of 173 posts

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#41
post #17

Kind of an odd metric to try to base this process off of. are more comments inherently better? is it responding to buzz words? Makes sense talking about hiring algos / resume scanners in part one and if anything this elucidates some of the trouble with them.

[deleted]

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#42
post #14
post #9

Very nice article. But the title, and the idea, is the very frequent "racist" form of the proper "People [can be] just as bad as my LLMs". Now: some people can't count. Some people hum between words. Some people set fire to national monuments. Reply: "Yes we knew", and "No, it's not necessary". And: if people could lift the tons, we would not have invented cranes. Very, very often in these pages I meet people repeati…

Racist is the wrong word probably maybe ... antisocial in that it is against society.

I wrote '"racist"', because the proponents insist that "all members of class X are also Y" (there where X does not imply Y as an "analytic judgement" - it is not entailed from the nature of X but accidental to X ... yet seen by the proponents as a constant property of X): that is the character of racism. "All wood is odorous", etc.

Those who insist that "all humans are " are "racist" against humanity (against the "human race", if you wish).

That spirit is in the refusal to see exceptions and to recognize that there can be exceptions.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#43
post #29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that we bias towards numbers with cultural or personal significance. 7 is lucky in western cultures and is religiously significant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7#Culture ). 42 is culturally significant in science fiction, though that's a lot more recent. There are probably other examples, but I imagine the mean converges on numbers with multiple cultural touchpoints.

I have never heard of 7 being a lucky number in western culture and your link doesn't support that. 3 is a lucky number, 13 is an unlucky number, 7 is nothing to me. So I don't think its that, 7 is still a very common "random number" here even though there is no special cultural significance to it.

>>I have never heard of 7 being a lucky number in western culture and your link doesn't support that. 3 is a lucky number, 13 is an unlucky number, 7 is nothing to me.

Some sustain that 7 is the God's number, stemming from "God created the world in seven days"[1]

Also, _"According to some, 777 represents the threefold perfection of the Trinity"_ [2]

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/What-Does-the-Number-7-Mean-in-the-B...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/777_(number)

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#44
post #34
post #27

But an LLM can't be held accountable.. neither can most employees, but we often forget that :)

Employees get fired all the time, and the more wrong answers I get from an LLM, the less I use it until it's never used again.

Jokes on you, my org at work just adopted KPIs about how many AI suggestions engineers accept

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#45

Is my understanding wrong that LLMs are trained to emulate observed human behavior in their training data? From that follows that LLMs fit to produce all kinds of human biases. Like preferring the first choice out of many, and the last our of many (primacy biases). Funnily the LLM might replicate the biases slightly wrong and by doing so produce new derived biases.

LLMs don't emulate human behavior. They spit out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#46
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racist is the wrong word probably maybe ... antisocial in that it is against society.

Maybe misanthropic?

Nope. Misanthropic is when some people dislike other people. Racist is when some people attribute some dubious quality to all people in some category.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#47
post #45

Is my understanding wrong that LLMs are trained to emulate observed human behavior in their training data? From that follows that LLMs fit to produce all kinds of human biases. Like preferring the first choice out of many, and the last our of many (primacy biases). Funnily the LLM might replicate the biases slightly wrong and by doing so produce new derived biases.

LLMs don't emulate human behavior. They spit out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data.

Is this just pedantry or is there some insight to be gleaned by the distinction you made?

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#48
post #29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that we bias towards numbers with cultural or personal significance. 7 is lucky in western cultures and is religiously significant (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7#Culture ). 42 is culturally significant in science fiction, though that's a lot more recent. There are probably other examples, but I imagine the mean converges on numbers with multiple cultural touchpoints.

I have never heard of 7 being a lucky number in western culture and your link doesn't support that. 3 is a lucky number, 13 is an unlucky number, 7 is nothing to me. So I don't think its that, 7 is still a very common "random number" here even though there is no special cultural significance to it.

I’ve heard 7 as lucky all my life in the US and it’s mentioned in the Wikipedia page for 7. I think if you asked the average English-speaking American to name a number thought of as lucky most people would say 7.

Lucky Seven/Lucky Number Seven is also just a common phrase in American culture. There’s even a Wikipedia page of things called Lucky [Number] Seven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_7

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#49
post #38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely used in slot machines as a lucky number. Which came first I'm not sure (but I suspect from a sibling comment in the same thread it's based on perceived commonality and primeness historically and became "lucky" in the past because of that).

While I have never heard of someone referring to 7 as a lucky number, 7 is the most common sum of two rolled dice. So I can see how people would regard it as a lucky number. Along the same lines, I assume that someone who mentions 42 as a random number has at least some interest in science fiction.

You must be living under a rock if you’ve never heard of 7 as a lucky number.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#50

Is my understanding wrong that LLMs are trained to emulate observed human behavior in their training data? From that follows that LLMs fit to produce all kinds of human biases. Like preferring the first choice out of many, and the last our of many (primacy biases). Funnily the LLM might replicate the biases slightly wrong and by doing so produce new derived biases.

This understanding is incomplete in my opinion. LLMs are more than emulating observed behavior. In the pre-training phase tasks like masked language model indeed train the model to mimic what they read (which of course contains lots of bias); but in the RLHF phase, the model tries to generate the best response judged by human evaluations (who tries to eliminate as much bias as possible in the process). In other words, they are trained to meet human expectations in this later phase.

But human expectations are also not bias-free (e.g. from the preferring-the-first-choice phenomenon)

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