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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
171–180 of 308 posts
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#172I'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? I work for a company with an open source product and the number of support requests we get from people who ask the chatbot to do their config and then end up with something nonfunctioning is quite significant. Goes up to users complaining our api is down because the chatbot hallucinated the endpoint.
LLMs do love to make up endpoints and parameters, but I have found that ones with web access are pretty good at copy/pasting configs if they can find them, so it might be worth a few minutes of exploring what people are actually finding that's causing it to make up an endpoint. I have not (yet!) seen an instance where making something easier for LLMs to parse didn't also help human comprehension.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 a…
Even ordering a pizza requires the cooperation of a functioning telecom system, a pizza manufacturer, a delivery person, a hungry customer...
Sure but I hope you get my point. Fighting takes effort, cooperation takes effort. Most people have other things to worry about and don't care about whatever it is you're fighting or cooperating over. People aren't motivated enough to try and sabotage the wikipedia articles of others. Even if they could automate it. There's just nothing in it for them.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why stop at newspapers, it's been a while since one could say books have any integrity, pretty much anyone can get anything into print these days. From political shenanigans to self help books designed to confirm people's biases to sell more units. Video's by far the hardest to fake but that's changing as well. Regardless of what media you get your info from you have to be selective of what sources you trust. It'…
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.
I think eventually humans are going to need to disregard confidence as any kind of indicator of quality, which will be very difficult. Something about us is hardwired to believe a confident delivery of words.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#175I think it's ok. When wikipedia arrived, everyone was up in arms that people are learning from something that's open for anyone to edit. But it rectified itself. The same thing happened when Internet arrived. "Don't believe anything you read on the Internet." I guess the reaction was same when printed media arrived. But the thing is, things get better over time.
Here's a thought - improving AI is a completely different ball game.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#176Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…
> How can meat think? Some of us used to think that meat spontaneously generated flies. Maybe someday we'll (re-)learn that meat doesn't spontaneously generate thought either?
My light-sensing meat read this as "spontaneously generated files" about 3 times before finally seeing maggots instead of tokens...
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#177LLMs, 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…
Now let me ask you the more fundamental question.. did this do you any better than if you had searched a youtube video or some other source? Would this be video from 2016 be relevant? This may not be the right video but my approach for DIY in the last 10-20 years was to hit youtube up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77q9KtjnNTU
I'm trying to gauge whether LLMs are truly expanding our capabilities in a fundamental way or are really just another way to search for answers without going to google or a library.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#1788 months or so ago, my quip regarding LLMs was “stochastic parrot.” The term I’ve been using of late is “authority simulator.” My formative experiences with “authority figures” was a person who can speak with breadth and depth about a subject and who seems to have internalized it because they can answer quickly and thoroughly. Because LLMs do this so well, it’s really easy to feel like you’re talking to an authority…
And for some of us, it may be an anti-authoritarianism stimulator.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#179Earlier 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…
> I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them. That's already happening. I don't even think we had a very long "Don't trust LLMs" phase, if we did it was very short. The "normies" already trust whatever they spit out. At leadership meetings at my work, if I say anything that goes against the marketing hype for LLMs, such as talking about "Don't trust LLMs", it's met with…
I can’t speak to your specific experience, but I do some of this kind of eye-rolling when people bring short term limitations on LLMs into long term strategy.
I’m reminded of when people at work assured me the internet was never going to impact media consumption because 28.8kbps is not nearly enough for video.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Now let me ask you the more fundamental question.. did this do you any better than if you had searched a youtube video or some other source? Would this be video from 2016 be relevant? This may not be the right video but my approach for DIY in the last 10-20 years was to hit youtube up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77q9KtjnNTU I'm trying to gauge whether LLMs are truly expanding our capabilities in a fundamental wa…
For obscure things, it's often very hard to find videos like that, and the videos vary greatly in quality. ChatGPT helped me fix my washing machine and my dryer yesterday with perfect advice, walking me through every step. Those are both projects I would've made a half assed attempt at and then thrown my hands up and called someone to do in the past.