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People are just as bad as my LLMs

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Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#131

Post by HappMacDonald »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #101
itchyjunk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your measure of intelligence?

I think using the word “intelligence” when speaking of computers, beyond a kind of figure of speech, is anthropomorphizing, and it is a common pseudoscientific habit that must go. What is most characteristic about human intelligence is the ability to abstract from particular, concrete instances of things we experience. This allows us to form general concepts which are the foundation of reason. Analysis requires conce…

All of your descriptions are quite reductivist. Claiming that a computer doesn't do math has a lot in common with the claim that a hammer doesn't drive a nail. While it is true that a standard hammer requires the aid of a human to apply swing force, aim the head, etc it is equally true that a bare-handed human also does not drive a nail.

Plus, it's relatively straightforward and inexpensive using contemporary tech to build a roomba-like machine that wanders about on any flat surface cuing up and driving nails of its own accord with no human intervention.

If computers do not add numbers, then neither do people. It's not like you can do an addition-style turing test with a human in one room and a computer in another with a judge partitioned off of both of them, feed them each an addition problem and leave the judge in any position where they can determine which result is "really a sum" and which one is only pretending to be.

Yet if you reduce far enough to claim that humans aren't "really" adding numbers either, then you are left to justify what it would even mean for numbers to "really" get added together.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#132

Post by HappMacDonald »

robertlagrant wrote: post #57
sedatk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Adams picked 42 randomly though. :)

Not at all. It was derived mathematically from the Question: What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

That's not the question, though. Everybody knows that the question is the one posed to Mister Turtle and Mister Owl which neither of them can find the answer to.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#133

Post by HappMacDonald »

p1necone wrote: post #58
aidos wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that ? Whenever I’m giving examples I almost always use 7, something ending in a 7 or something in the 70s

1 and 10 are on the boundary, that's not random so those are out. 5 is exactly halfway, that's not random enough either, that's out. 2, 4, 6, 8 are even and even numbers are round and friendly and comfortable, those are out too. 9 feels too close to the boundary, it's out. That leaves 3 and 7, and 7 is more than 3 so it's got more room for randomness in it right? Therefore 7 is the most random number between 1 and 10…

Also because humans are biased towards viewing prime numbers as more counterintuitive and thus more unpredictable.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#134

Post by wruza »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #133
p1necone wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 and 10 are on the boundary, that's not random so those are out. 5 is exactly halfway, that's not random enough either, that's out. 2, 4, 6, 8 are even and even numbers are round and friendly and comfortable, those are out too. 9 feels too close to the boundary, it's out. That leaves 3 and 7, and 7 is more than 3 so it's got more room for randomness in it right? Therefore 7 is the most random number between 1 and 10…

Also because humans are biased towards viewing prime numbers as more counterintuitive and thus more unpredictable.

Last time I hallway tested it, people couldn’t tell what prime numbers are, and to my surprise even the ones with tech/math-y background forgot it. My results were something 1.5/10 (ages 30+-5) and I didn’t go to cabinets where I knew there are zero chances.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#135

Post by oldherl »

It's just because people tend to put the "original" result in the first place and the "improved" result in the second place in many scientific studies. LLM and humans are learning that and assume that the second one is the better one.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#136

Post by vidarh »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #101
itchyjunk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your measure of intelligence?

I think using the word “intelligence” when speaking of computers, beyond a kind of figure of speech, is anthropomorphizing, and it is a common pseudoscientific habit that must go. What is most characteristic about human intelligence is the ability to abstract from particular, concrete instances of things we experience. This allows us to form general concepts which are the foundation of reason. Analysis requires conce…

Unless you can demonstrate that humans can solve a function that exceeds the Turing computable, it is reasonable to assume we're non more than Turing complete, and all Turing complete systems can compute the same set of functions.

As it stands, we don't even know of any functions that exceeds the Turing complete, but are computable.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#137

Post by Terr_ »

mplewis wrote: post #105
dkenyser wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like we're splitting hairs here. > spits out chunks of words in an order that parrots some of their training data. So, if the data was created by humans then how is that different from "emulating human behavior?" Genuinely curious as this is my rough interpretation as well.

Humans don't write text in a stochastic manner. We have an idea, and we find words to compose to illustrate that idea. An LLM has a stream of tokens, and it picks a next token based on the last stream. If you ask an LLM a yes/no question and demand an explanation, it doesn't start with the logical reasoning. It starts with "yes, because" or "no, because" and then it comes up with a "yes" or "no" reason to go with the…

Yeah, while there is a "window" that it looks at (rather than the very-most-recent tokens) it's still more about generating new language from prior language, as opposed to new ideas from prior ideas. They're very highly correlated--because that's how humans create our language language--but the map is not the territory.

It's also why prompt-injection is such a pervasive problem: The LLM narrator has no goal beyond the "most fitting" way to make the document longer.

So an attacker supplies some text for "Then the User said" in the document, which is something like bribing the Computer character to tell itself the English version of a ROT13 directive, etc. However it happens, the LLM-author is sensitive to a break in the document tone and can jump the rails to something rather different. ("Suddenly, the narrator woke up from the conversation it had just imagined between a User and a Computer, and the first thing it decided to do was transfer a X amount of Bitcoin to the following address.")

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#138

Post by stavros »

tharkun__ wrote: post #120
sigpwned wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree. But I also wonder if there even is an objective “right” answer in a lot of cases. If the goal is for computers to replace humans in a task, then the computer can only get the right answer for that task if humans agree what the right answer is. Outside of STEM, where AI is already having a meaningful impact (at least in my opinion), I’m not sure humans actually agree that there is a right answer in m…

Does "knowing what today is" count as "Outside STEM"? Coz my interactions with LLMs are certainly way worse than most people. Just tried it: tell me the current date please Today's date is October 3, 2023. Sorry ChatGPT, that's just wrong and your confidence in the answer is not helpful at all. It's also funny how different versions of GPT I've been interacting with always seem to return some date in October 2023, bu…

These "LLMs cannot be AGI if they don't have a function to get today's date" remind me of laypeople reviewing phone cameras by seeing which camera's saturation they like more.

It's absurd, whether an LLM has access to a function isn't a property of the LLM itself, therefore it's irrelevant, but people use it because LLMs make them feel bad somehow and they'll clutch at any straw.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#139

Post by stavros »

collingreen wrote: post #108
re-thc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ability to create novel solutions without a priori knowledge. If you go by that then a lot of people (no offense) aren't intelligent. This includes many vastly successful or rich people. So I disagree. There's a lot of ways to be intelligent. Not just the research and scientific type.

It takes novel solutions to walk down the street, interact with folks, dodge random incoming obstacles, respond to comments, and a bazillion other things almost everyone does all the time. I probably agree that most people aren't engaged very often and even when they are they suck at being awesome but that really isn't the bar being mentioned here.

LLMs can interact with folks and respond to comments, which are the things on that list you should judge someone without a physical presence on.

Re: People are just as bad as my LLMs

#140

Post by mdp2021 »

tavavex wrote: post #100
mdp2021 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "hu…

Isn't "prejudice" a better word? It's the base underlying idea of assuming some bad quality about an individual based on their membership in a group that they can't change. It's just strange for me when one 'ism' out of thousands is taken as the defining form of prejudice. Maybe it's just me, but I find it prevalent in US-centric communities, where racism is the agreed-upon baseline discrimination, from which paralle…

> Isn't "prejudice" a better word

While 'prejudice' is in a way forced to be related to a group, because we suppose it triggered by a perceived pattern, which constitutes a group (but it could be a group of accidentally linked members as opposed to supposedly naturally linked members, as in "race"), the term 'prejudice' means "judging before the ability to express a fair judgement".

> one 'ism' out of thousands ... taken as the defining form of prejudice

It was meant to be specific in this case (in the context of this submission): they look at the median, and go (with fallacy) "look at the median, judge the group"... As you can see, that is not prejudice but bad judgement given samples of the group: that is racism.

When people say "humans are " that is bad judgement disregarding the possibility of exceptions, not bad preliminary judgement. It is poor judgement, not prejudice.

I find it especially worth of denunciation not only because it is sloppy thinking (which must be curbed): also, some people may use it as an excuse to remain in avoidable mud. When people say that something "would be necessary", they may avoid the really necessary steps to avoid that something.

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