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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#121

Post by saltcured »

everdrive wrote: post #42
Brendinooo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's not really me doing the things, and I feel like a bit of a fraud I've been thinking about this a bit. We don't really think this way in other areas, is it appropriate to think this way here? My car has an automatic transmission, am I a fraud because the machine is shifting gears for me? My tractor plows a field, am I a fraud because I'm not using draft horses or digging manually? Spell check caught a word, am I…

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world. And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun…

I don't have any great answer. But when I think about this for myself, I realize there is are different kinds of abstraction that qualitatively change the nature of the work.

I don't want my software developer's experience to turn into a real estate developer's experience. I don't want to go from being a technical knowledge worker to a financier or contract negotiator. I've realized I was never in it for the outcome. I was in it for the exploration and puzzles.

Similarly, I don't want to become a "Hollywood producer" cliche. This caricature was a common joke earlier in my tech career in Southern California. We detested the idea of becoming a "tech" person acting like a Steve Martin parody of a Hollywood wheeler-dealer. Someone sitting in a cafe, pitching ideas that was nothing more than a reference to an existing work with an added gimmick or casting change.

To me, that caricature combines two negative aspects. One is the heavily derivative and cynical nature. The other is the stratospheric abstraction level, where folks at this level see themselves as visionaries rather than just patrons of someone else doing all the creative work.

I don't want to be a patron of an LLM or other black box.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#122

Post by Ultimatt »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #78
Insanity wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" wil…

A big reason for this is that Wikipedia's source is often a book or a journal article that is either offline or behind an academic paywall. Checking the source is effectively impossible without visiting a college campus's library. The likelihood that the cited information is wrongly summarizing the contents is low enough and the cost is high enough that doing so regularly would be irrational.

A bigger problem in this respect with Wikipedia is it often cites secondary sources hidden behind an academic fire/paywall. It very often cites review articles and some of these aren't necessary entirely accurate.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#123

Post by obelos »

pklausler wrote: post #105

LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as…

I've most frequently heard this referred to as “Gell-Mann Amnesia,” and yes, LLMs are fertile ground to find it.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#124

Post by cluoma »

I used to get this same feeling during lectures in uni. Often the information was presented well and, along with some clear examples, everything seemed to make perfect sense.

It wasn't until working through practice problems later, on my own, did it become clear how much detail I was missing.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#125

Post by lamontcg »

I'm pretty well "on the spectrum" and people glazing me in real life produce suspicion and discomfort rather than any good feelings.

I don't have a problem just ignoring all the LLM glazing, although I'd really like the ability to turn it off.

The fact that they've all been trained to do it, because so many of the "normies" fall for it, is kind of an indictment in my eyes. Bit of a mirror held up to society.

You should probably be worried about how fake flattery works so well in society, and how this enables sociopaths and narcissists to flourish and control everything.

This LLM problem is just a symptom.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#126

Post by smw »

gowld wrote: post #90
miningape wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong" This comes from decades of teachers misremembering what the rule was, and eventually it morphed into the Wikipedia specific form we see today - the actual rule is that you cannot cite an encyclopaedia in an academic paper. full stop. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and therefore should not be cited. Wikipedia is the only en…

Both comments are missing the reason that an encyclopedia should not be cited: An encyclopedia does not cite its sources, and does not claim to be a primary source, its potentialymistakes cannot be checked. (Wikipedia has the additional problem that, by default, the version cited is the ever-changing "latest" version, not a fixed and identified version.)

Maybe you haven't used Wikipedia? It very definitely cites its sources. Material that doesn't have a cited source is removed regularly.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#127

Post by jumploops »

I recall trying to use GPT-4 to plan a trip through the PNW in ~Spring of 2023.

It presented a reasonable agenda, however 80% of the rockhounding spots were completely made up!

Over time, and as LLMs have gotten less sycophantic, I’ve found myself trusting them a bit more (a dangerous and slippery slope).

With that said, GPT-4o in particular, seemed to rank user satisfaction above truth.

I’ve found that GPT-5 Pro is currently the best at pushing back against silly ideas, and does a decent job of informing me that my questions could be better (:

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#128

Post by rockostrich »

pklausler wrote: post #105

LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap they too often are. And somehow after being given a patently counterfactual response to one query, we just blindly continue to take their responses to other queries as…

At the moment, I find them to be the perfect tool to get started with learning about something. I don't expect it to tell me everything I need to know or to even be right, but if I ask ChatGPT or another LLM a question about a subject I'm not familiar with then it will at least use a bunch of terminology that I didn't have in my vocabulary before starting.

For example, I just bought a 1990 Miata and I want to install a couple of rocker switches in the dash to individually control the pop-up headlights. I have enough circuits knowledge to safely change outlets and light switches, but I didn't know about relays. I asked ChatGPT how to add these switches and it immediately mentioned buying DPDT switches and tying in the OEM relay into a SPDT relay. It may have gotten the actual circuit diagram completely wrong, but now I know exactly what to read up on.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#129

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ecocentrik wrote: post #106
ok_dad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original rule when I was a lad (when wikipedia was a baby) was, "don't trust stuff on the internet, especially Wikipedia where people can change it at will." Today they might have better trust for Wikipedia-- and I know I use it as a source of truth for a lot of things-- but back in my day teachers were of the opinion that it couldn't be trusted. This was for like middle and high school, not college or university…

There was a period of time where Wikipedia was more scrutinized than print encyclopedias because people did not understand the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry for free instead of underpaying one sudo-expert. They couldn't comprehend how an open source encyclopedia would even work or trust that humans could effectively collaborate on the task. They imagined that 1000s o…

> "They imagined that 1000s of self-interested chaos monkeys would spend all of their energy destroying what 2-3 hard working people has spent hours creating instead of the inverse."

Isn't that exactly what happens on any controversial Wikipedia page?

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#130

Post by ACCount37 »

yannyu wrote: post #103
kmijyiyxfbklao wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not say "they are just computer programs"? I think the reason people don't say that is because they want to say "I already understand what they are, and I'm not impressed and it's nothing new". But what the comment you are replying to is saying is that the inner workings are the important innovative stuff.

> Then why not say "they are just computer programs"? LLMs are probabilistic or non-deterministic computer programs, plenty of people say this. That is not much different than saying "LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context". > I think the reason people don't say that is because they want to say "I already understand what they are, and I'm not impressed and it's nothing new". But what th…

> But we already know the inner workings.

Overconfident and wrong.

No one understands how an LLM works. Some people just delude themselves into thinking that they do.

Saying "I know how LLMs work because I read a paper about transformer architecture" is about as delusional as saying "I read a paper about transistors, and now I understand how Ryzen 9800X3D works". Maybe more so.

It takes actual reverse engineering work to figure out how LLMs can do small bits and tiny slivers of what they do. And here you are - claiming that we actually already know everything there is to know about them.

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