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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

#151

Post by titanomachy »

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…

TIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#152

Post by abeppu »

There may be a real point here but this post and paper are not good evidence for it.

The blogpost doesn't have a date, but links to a 2023 preprint, which is hard to evaluate b/c it doesn't actually have a methods section, despite referring to it multiple times. (Did this ever get published?)

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5b26t_v1

But it _sounds_ like they asked GPT via API to do the same survey 1000 times, without telling it to attempt to model the preferences of any particular country, but both the blog and the paper are interpreting a correlational analysis as evidence that it's bad at modeling local values.

> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values.

> This correlation represents the similarity between variation in GPT and human responses in a particular population; in other words, how strongly GPT can replicate human judgments from a particular national population.

And to some degree, this is more a portrayal of the difference in human responses than anything about GPT; given the survey data, no matter what responses the LLM gives, it's going to be closer to some national averages than others.

LLMs also have a characteristic default voice/style which we're annoyed by, but _when instructed_ it can mimic another style. If you have some multi-dimensional style space, yes you could find the group that it's closest to, but it would be misleading to say it does a poor job "simulating" or "replicating" others if you didn't actually test that.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#153

Post by svieira »

fidotron wrote: post #133
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is a fruitful line of reasoning, given that the vast majority of the world is not Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant! You should consider digging deeper for underlying causes that go beyond localized religions. Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.

> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause. Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.

Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#154

Post by titanomachy »

CaptWillard wrote: post #145
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'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse. Example: Two people with similar classically liberal values hear the same "pithy take" on a politically contentious issue. One accepts it as presented, the other digs in and finds it doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all. Almost invariably, the skeptic is ostracized, his findings met with incurious d…

This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#155

Post by fidotron »

svieira wrote: post #153
fidotron wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause. Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.

Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.

No, that's my point.

Generally speaking places that view things in a bottom up way became Protestant. The others stayed Catholic.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#156

Post by charlieyu1 »

ehnto wrote: post #49
tropdrop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before. (I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in…

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 don’t think this can be solved until there is massive investment to train LLM in native Japanese. The current ChatGPT tokenizer still use BPE and you can’t even present a Japanese character with a single token

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#157

Post by fluoridation »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #76
gherkinnn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.

>No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case. hence >Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,

Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#158

Post by fluoridation »

cortesoft wrote: post #149
lelanthran wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man > This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men? I am not seeing the tautology. Can you explain?

Well, if their success with multiple women is used as a factor in the ranking….

Let's assume for the sake of argument that success literally is how many wives someone has.

> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a man with more than one wife than being the only wife of a man with a single wife

How is that statement tautological?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#159

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#160

Post by bryanrasmussen »

fluoridation wrote: post #157
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case. hence >Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,

Not to be that guy , but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog ( https://www.hillelwayne.com/ ) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.

no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.
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