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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#221

Post by austin-cheney »

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…

I read your comment and just see the typical web developer.

I can’t count how many times developers have tried to school me with their expert wisdom. It’s typically garbage, complete Dunning-Kruger. The causes are two-fold.

On one hand most of these people’s capabilities are an inch wide. Maybe they are really good about JSX, but you take that away and wisdom becomes empty hostility. I don’t want anything to do with JSX or React, so it that’s all you got you are probably just blowing smoke.

The other cause is no experience at all. For example somebody might think they are super knowledgeable on WebSockets because they used a package off NPM. They have no idea how it really works, can’t understand RFC6455 even with Cliff Notes, and can’t write original code.

If you want to be an expert at least start with your own implementation of the thing you want to be an expert about, but most of the people doing that work can’t program.

I can’t help but wonder if the DK coming out of LLMs is really any worse.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#222

Post by ordu »

goalieca wrote: post #177
rockostrich wrote: post #128

Earlier 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…

> did this do you any better than if you had searched a youtube video or some other source?

Yes. With LLM it is easy to explore the domain from ground up, and it is interactive. You don't wait for some random guy in a video to come to a point, you are asking questions, consuming the information at your speed.

When I do this, I switch constantly between a search engine and LLM. I copy words of LLM into search box, and asking LLM questions about things I've found. It is the way to explore things. Search engines alone are not. Not anymore. At least you need to ask LLM for some starting points, because when you search google, you get results that are LLM slop. The same thing you can get from LLM, but not interactive, so it can go and go for multiple screens of a wall of a text, while delivering exactly zero useful information.

> 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.

They just another way to search. And you should strike Google, it doesn't work anymore. 15 years ago google was good enough, but now it is useless.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#223

Post by dktoao »

vehemenz wrote: post #8

I hate to comment on just a headline—thought I did read the article—but it's wrong enough to warrant correcting. This is not what the Dunning-Kruger effect is. It's lacking metacognitive ability to understand one's own skill level. Overconfidence resulting from ignorance isn't the same thing. Joe Rogan propagated the version of this phenomenon that infiltrated public consciousness, and we've been stuck with it ever s…

Ok, I think you are going to need to explain to me why "Overconfidence resulting from ignorance" isn't exactly the same thing as "lacking metacognitive ability to understand one's own skill level". Just worded more simply

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#224

Post by [deleted] »

jumploops wrote: post #127

I recall trying to use GPT-4 to plan a trip through the PNW in ~Spring of 2023. It presented a reasonable agenda, however 80% of the rockhounding spots were completely made up! Over time, and as LLMs have gotten less sycophantic, I’ve found myself trusting them a bit more (a dangerous and slippery slope). With that said, GPT-4o in particular, seemed to rank user satisfaction above truth. I’ve found that GPT-5 Pro is…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#225

Post by dr_hooo »

habibur wrote: post #161

I 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.

> The same thing happened when Internet arrived. "Don't believe anything you read on the Internet."

Isn't the saying "Don't believe *everything* you read on the Internet."? Which is quite different (and still holds today).

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#226

Post by adammarples »

dcminter wrote: post #205
cynicalkane wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm. Why should I take this critique as being any more accurate than Bryson, given that the writer says in so many words: "[...] I - someone who’s far from an expert at linguistics [...]" The rather sniffy observation about Wikipedia falls very flat as the book was written 10 years before Wikipedia existed! In fact Bryson wrote his book a good 20 years earlier than this critique so perhaps this huffy person has resou…

The writer doesn't claim that Bryson should have consulted Wikipedia, more that the myth that eskimos have 500 words for snow is so famous that the myth itself has a Wikipedia page dedicated to it. The discussion had been going on a long time when Bryson wrote this book, and I remember well being told this as a child in the 80's. To present what was either known as an urban myth or at least under a more nuanced discussion (they do, but it's due to how root words are easier to pluralise, not snow per se) is pretty lazy in a non-fiction book.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#227

Post by mr_toad »

brookst wrote: post #170
elgenie wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s the biggest crisis since math students started using graphing calculators.

LLMs are just graphing calculators for the humanities.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#228

Post by shagie »

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…

I was curious about exploring the motivations of a character (specifically Linter in The State of the Art) and asked a question to start off with (and bring existing understanding into the context) with another character (Diziet Sma)... and ChatGPT got things wrong...

The chat is https://chatgpt.com/share/691266fa-c76c-8011-876c-027206abd2... if one is curious. I continued a bit to see what else it got right and wrong.

The thing is if you don't know the story or the books mentioned... it's perfectly plausible that what was written is correct. And while a good bit of it is... maybe; that it got material facts wrong makes it "if it's working from that, then nothing it produces is based on the correct information."

I've known that ChatGPT is full of crap (and experienced in other chats).

It can be a good tool to augment some capacities - but the exploration of ideas based on facts and reality are often (at best) flawed and if one is to try to build upon those flaws and add in one's own misconceptions, then its output is even more questionable.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#229

Post by remich »

ACCount37 wrote: post #138
parineum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what claim your disputing or making with this. What more are LLMs than statistical inference machines? I don't know that I'd assert that's all they are with confidence but all the configurations options I can play with during generation (Top K, Top P, Temperature, etc.) are all ways to _not_ select the most likely next token which leads me to believe that they are, in fact, just statistical inference mac…

What more are human brains than piles of wet meat? It's not an argument - it's a dismissal. It's boneheaded refusal to think on the matter in any depth, or consider any of the implications. The main reason to say "LLMs are just next token predictions" is to stop thinking about all the inconvenient things. Things like "how the fuck does training on piles of text make machines that can write new short stories" or "why…

The way I always like to think about it is: "a computer shouldn't be able to do this."

I'm an SWE working in AI-related development so I have a probably higher baseline of understanding than most, but even I end up awed sometimes. For example, I was playing a video game the other night that had an annoying box sliding puzzle in it (you know, where you've got to move a piece to specific area but it's blocked by other pieces that you need to move in some order first). I struggled with it for way too long (because I missed a crucial detail), so for shits and giggles I decided to let ChatGPT have a go at it.

I took a photo of the initial game board on my tv and fed it into the high thinking version with a bit of text describing the desired outcome. ChatGPT was able to process the image and my text and after a few turns generated python code to solve it. It didn't come up with the solution, but that's because of the detail I missed that fundamentally changed the rules.

Anyway, I've been in the tech industry long enough that I have a pretty good idea of what should and shouldn't be possible with programs. It's absolutely wild to me that I was able to use a photo of a game board and like three sentences of text and end up with an accurate conclusion (that it was unsolvable based on the provided rules). There's so much more potential with these things than many people realize.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#230

Post by hyperbolablabla »

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…

Indeed, a couple years ago I tried to use chatgpt to clarify some confusing parts of geometric algebra to me, and it confidently told me completely useless information which I had to blindly trust. Fast forward a couple years, I've read more on the subject from trusted sources, and realised everything it was telling me was pure BS.
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