Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

bytesauna.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 308 posts

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#151

Post by lexicality »

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?

Honestly I wouldn't worry about it. He's a wonderful writer, the problem is that he doesn't let reality get in the way of a good story. Just classify them with the rest of the fiction-non-fiction books and enjoy the journey. If you ever find yourself asking "wow is that true?" then it probably isn't.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#152

Post by thewebguyd »

nis0s wrote: post #132
thewebguyd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is why I am surprised that people think these models are good enough to replace humans at work. There are a lot of office jobs that I'd fit into the category of "bullshit jobs." They may serve some purpose in the huge bureaucracy of enterprises but the day to day ultimately boils doing to managing someone's calendar and sending emails. Quite a few people at my work have now started using Copilot for their ema…

I go back and forth on the idea that some jobs are bullshit, maybe I haven’t been exposed to enough industries or work places. Every place I worked definitely didn’t have bullshit jobs to hand out as adult daycare, but I can see how some places can become bloated because an over ambitious middle manager wants to say they manage X number of people on their resume. So there are bullshit jobs in that there are people wh…

Yeah, I agree with that, and a more accurate description than mine.

The people in those roles are being mismanaged/misutilized rather than the job itself being bullshit.

I've seen the bloating first hand though, and you're right, that's usually what leads to those jobs. Some department over hires to pad the resume of some middle manager, and now you have a team that's severely over staffed to the point each individual contributor has maybe 2 to 3 hours of actual work to do in a day.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#153

Post by jjk166 »

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.)

That's not at all the reason.

Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, compilations of information generated by others. They are neither sources of first hand information (primary sources) nor original analysis (secondary sources). You can't cite encyclopedias because there's nothing to cite. The encyclopedia was not the first place the claim was made, even if it was the first place you happened to read it. You don't attribute a Wayne Gretsky quote to Michael Scott no matter how clearly he told you Wayne Gretsky said it.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#155

Post by bamboozled »

cluoma wrote: post #124

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.

Detail missing and being a confidently wrong are two different things though ?

Edit: Claude told me the other day told me my entire building might have to be demolished due to a slightly bow in my newly poured stem wall, I uploaded a photo etc and it was liked, “yes this is a serious structural issue blah blah blah” , the inspector came to look at it and literally laughed that I was worried about it.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#156

Post by ecocentrik »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #129
ecocentrik wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's not that many controversial topics at any given time. One of Wikipedia's solutions was to lock pages until a controversy subsided. Perma-controversy has been managed in other ways, like avoiding the statement of opinion as fact, the use of clear and uncontroversial language, using discussion pages to hash out acceptable and unacceptable content, competent moderators... Rage burns itself and people get bored with vandalism.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#157

Post by elgenie »

cluoma wrote: post #124

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.

Now consider what's happening to the learning process of the (rather large) subset of current college students choosing to replace that struggle for detailed understanding with LLM queries.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#158

Post by doctorpangloss »

sho_hn wrote: post #4

I'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…

Nothing stops you from spending the paltry $60 to find out how ridiculously good coding agents are. It’s only a matter of time for other problems.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#159

Post by kaydub »

rockostrich wrote: post #128
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…

Yeah, it's definitely been terrific for figuring out terminology or "the right word" to use for things.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#160

Post by ecocentrik »

gspencley wrote: post #142
ecocentrik wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Even ordering a pizza requires the cooperation of a functioning telecom system, a pizza manufacturer, a delivery person, a hungry customer...
Post reply on HN