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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#141

Post by jancsika »

pessimizer wrote: post #99
vablings wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to provide any counter-examples? Please make it know if you end up using Wikipedia for your source of if Wikipedia's quality has changed

How in the world would you supply a counter-example for "the quality of Wikipedia has/hasn't improved substantially in the last decade"? I also can't even read the second sentence. I think there are typos there, but there's no mental correction I can do to make it coherent for me.

I can't think of a better accidental metric than that!

I'll go ahead and speculate that the number of incoherent sentences per article has gone down substantially over the last decade, probably due to the relevant tooling getting better over the same period.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#142

Post by gspencley »

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…

> In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate.

Personally, my opinion of human nature falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

I think when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to order a pizza.

A content creator I used to follow was fond of saying "Chill out, America isn't headed towards another civil war. We're way too fat and lazy for that."

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#143

Post by jcgrillo »

AlienRobot wrote: post #71
Night_Thastus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that LLM output is so incredibly confident in tone. It really sounds like you're talking to an expert who has years of experience and has done the research for you - and tech companies push this angle quite hard. That's bad when their output can be complete garbage at times.

It makes me really sad how Google pushes this technology that is simply flat out wrong sometimes. I forgot what exactly I searched for, but I searched for a color model that Krita supports hoping to get the online documentation as the first result and the under several Youtube thumbnails the AI overview was telling me that Krita doesn't support that color model and you need a plugin for that. Under the AI overview wa…

The next time you're working on your car google bolt torque specs and cross reference the shit their "AI" says with the factory shop manual. Hilarity ensues.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#144

Post by bryanlarsen »

Kiro wrote: post #133
bryanlarsen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for us, every bug that makes it into a release that gets installed on a client computer costs us 100x - 1000x as much as a bug that gets caught earlier.

Most code is not critical like that. A lot of the stuff I write has very little impact if things go wrong and it's easy to tell if it's incorrect.

As long as you have some mechanism to catch the issues before it hits customers. Too many software companies are OK shoveling crap on customers because it's easy to fix it in the field. Yes, it's easy to fix in the field, after you've inconvenienced and wasted the time of thousands of customers.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#145

Post by mattcantstop »

I think this is true. It can super charge some bad takes.

But I've had the opposite experience. The average person is never going to read a scientific study, nor invest the time to find out the real details of any topic they are opinionated about other than simply typing a Youtube search and finding a video that is:

- Entertaining - The person has their same biases - the present the information in a short, consumable manner that doesn't require much investment.

In comparison to this dynamic LLMs are wonderful. They can reference scientific data. I have noticed that they do push back on bad takes (very gently) and steer people towards truth.

It's not that I think LLMs are perfect. They are not. But they are infinitely better than the average human at discovering truth.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#148

Post by sarmasamosarma »

j-bos wrote: post #134
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…

> 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 Wow, I have a couple Bill Bryson books on my reading list, can you share some examples of that?

[dead]

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#149

Post by cynicalkane »

j-bos wrote: post #134
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…

> 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 Wow, I have a couple Bill Bryson books on my reading list, can you share some examples of that?

I read this good breakdown on 'The Mother Tongue' on everything2 sometime ago: https://everything2.com/title/The+Mother+Tongue%253A+English...

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#150

Post by kraftman »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #119
kraftman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I wanted to tile my bathroom, from chatgpt i learned about laser levels, ledger boards, and levelling spacers (id only seen those cross corner ones before).

FWIW that seems like low stakes compared to what I see other people using LLMs for (e.g medical advice).

I guess. I also used it to check the side effects of coming off prednisolone, and it gave me some areas to look at. I've used it a bunch to check out things around kidney transplants and everything ive verified has been correct.
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