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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#11

Post by Insanity »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

I'm not sure this is something I really worry about. Whenever I use an LLM I feel dumber, not smarter; there's a sensation of relying on a crutch instead of having done the due diligence of learning something myself. I'm less confident in the knowledge and less likely to present it as such. Is anyone really cocksure on the basis of LLM received knowledge? > As I ChatGPT user I notice that I’m often left with a sense…

I remember back when I was in secondary school, something commonly heard was

"Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong".

Now, almost 2 decades later, I rarely hear this stance and I see people relying on wikipedia as an authoritative source of truth. i.e, linking to wikipedia instead of the underlying sources.

In the same sense, I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#12

Post by freejazz »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

I'm not sure this is something I really worry about. Whenever I use an LLM I feel dumber, not smarter; there's a sensation of relying on a crutch instead of having done the due diligence of learning something myself. I'm less confident in the knowledge and less likely to present it as such. Is anyone really cocksure on the basis of LLM received knowledge? > As I ChatGPT user I notice that I’m often left with a sense…

> Is anyone really cocksure on the basis of LLM received knowledge?

Yeah, the stupid.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#14

Post by stevenwoo »

gopheryourshelf wrote: post #6

>“the problem with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Is it me or does everyone find that dumb people seem to use this statement more than ever?

It appears to be a paraphrasing of William Butler Yeats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#15

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Humans broadly have a tenuous grasp of “reality” and “truth.” Propagandists, spies and marketers know what philosophers of mind prove all too well: most humans do not perceive or interact with reality as it is, rather their perception of it as it contributes or contradicts their desired future.

Provide a person confidence in their opinion and they will not challenge it, as that would risk the reward of lend you live in a coherent universe.

The majority person has never heard the term “epistemology” despite the concept being central to how people derive coherence. Yet all these trite pieces written about AI and its intersectionality with knowledge claim some important technical distinction.

I’m hopeful that a crisis of epistemology is coming, though that’s probably too hopeful. I’m just enjoying the circus at this point

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#16

Post by balderdash »

I ascribe the effect of LLMs as similar to reading the newspaper, when I learn about something I have no knowledge base in I come away feeling like I learned a lot. When I interact with a newspaper or LLM in an area where I have real domain expertise I realize they don’t know what they are talking about - which is concerning about the information I get from them about topics I don’t have that high level of domain expertise.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#17

Post by yannyu »

Chabsff wrote: post #3

> I feel like LLMs are a fairly boring technology. They are stochastic black boxes. The training is essentially run-of-the-mill statistical inference. There are some more recent innovations on software/hardware-level, but these are not LLM-specific really. This is pretty ironic, considering the subject matter of that blog post. It's a super-common misconception that's gained very wide popularity due to reactionary (a…

What's the misconception? LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context, right?

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#18

Post by code_for_monkey »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

I'm not sure this is something I really worry about. Whenever I use an LLM I feel dumber, not smarter; there's a sensation of relying on a crutch instead of having done the due diligence of learning something myself. I'm less confident in the knowledge and less likely to present it as such. Is anyone really cocksure on the basis of LLM received knowledge? > As I ChatGPT user I notice that I’m often left with a sense…

unfortunately im like you and we are in the minority. The manager class loves the llm and doesnt seem to consider its flaws like that.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#20

Post by kraftman »

I feel like when I talk to someone and they tell me a fact, that fact goes into a kind of holding space, where I apply a filter of 'who is this person that is telling me this thing to know what the thing they are telling me is'. There's how well I know them, there's the other beleifs I know they have, there's their professional experience and their personal experience. That fact then gets marked as 'probably a true fact' or 'mark beleives in aliens'.

When I use chatGPT I do the same before I've asked for the fact: how common is this problem? how well known is it? How likely is that chatgpt both knows it and can surface it? Afterwards I don't feel like I know something, I feel like I've got a faster broad idea of what facts might exist and where to look for them, a good set of things to investigate, etc.

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