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AI tools are making the world look weird

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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#111

Post by ACCount37 »

numpad0 wrote: post #103
ehnto wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes. For example (not actual output): Input: "こにちは"(konichwa) Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I shoul…

I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fa…

Why would that be an issue?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#112

Post by tobyhinloopen »

psidium wrote: post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

> He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).

Must suck to be a lower-ranking man lol

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#113

Post by psidium »

Terr_ wrote: post #104
suddenlybananas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part of the brain that recognises faces quite literally shrinks in literates compared to illiterates https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill." It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both group…

IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#114

Post by psidium »

sethammons wrote: post #79
psidium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had

All the basketball players are tall. Ergo, if we want to be taller, we should all play basketball.

Yes, maybe I was not clear but I’m in doubt of the Italy claim in the book and that’s why I remember it

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#115

Post by rollcat »

lelanthran wrote: post #96
dsign wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals. But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of chil…

> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence. Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continu…

> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.

This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#116

Post by adwn »

psidium wrote: post #105
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask (and I don't mean this combatively) - given the ongoing realization of the replication crisis, how likely is it that the book you mention reflects a summation of the "too pat" studies about human behavior that, en masse, always seem pithy in an interesting headline, but years later end up being completely bunk? I've noticed over the years many chains of reasoning - made up of what I believe someone call…

I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footno…

> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers.

That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original scientist. This is especially concerning because many results with strong statements – unintuitive ones as well as bias-confirming ones – turned out to be non-existent [1]. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "shallowness" or "cocktail-party takes", although the strength of the purported effects, combined with pop-science simplifications and reductions, lend themselves well to such memetically spreading factoids.

[1] The "softer" sciences tend to be much more affected by this than the "harder" sciences.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#117

Post by rollcat »

ManlyBread wrote: post #92

>In fact, this paper found that more than that, it thinks American. I think that's because it seems to be primarily trained on reddit and therefore mirrors everything reddit stands for. Not a good thing considering just how overrun the site is with bots and political activists of all kinds.

You're absolutely right! Social media like Reddit are overrun with bots, sycophants, and trolls trying to provoke reactions by engaging in controversial topics. This forms echo chambers, which is a sub-par source for training data, and reflects those biases in LLM responses.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#118

Post by SiempreViernes »

psidium wrote: post #5

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich. It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discer…

The acronym was coined in a paper with the same title about 10 years before the book.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#119

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

maxbond wrote: post #80
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.

Keep in mind that I am also WEIRD. Please help me to understand by referring to the specific part of the article where WEIRD was used in the pejorative.

Are you saying that self-hating westerners aren’t real? It’s an entire industry at this point.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#120

Post by johnisgood »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #74
maxbond wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times). Po…

When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.

Another acceptable response is "take a break, go touch grass".

There is too much victim mentality going on nowadays, and we continue rewarding that behavior so I am not surprised.

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