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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#231

Post by mr_toad »

the_af wrote: post #49
aeve890 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone thinks they're the intelligent ones, of course. Which reinforces the repetition ad nauseam of Dunning Kruger. Which is on itself dumb AF because the effect described by Dunning and Kruger has been repeatedly exaggerated and misinterpreted. Which in turn is even dumber because Dunning-Kruger effect is debatable and reproducibility is weak at best.

Yeah, nobody who ever mentions the DK effect (myself included) ever stops to consider they might be in the "dumb" cohort ;) We are all geniuses!

I know I’m a terrible driver. I just think everyone else is worse.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#232

Post by chipsrafferty »

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…

Search hasn't worked for years now.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#233

Post by zkmon »

yannyu wrote: post #117
zkmon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get "frequently" misinformed by ChatGPT. What kind of prompts you are using, that make ChatGPT to give false info very often?

It's remarkably easy to get ChatGPT to hallucinate. A go-to for me is to ask it about factual things as compared to other factual things. The description of the Bluey episode is wrong in nearly every possible way. Additionally, the response continues on analyzing in multiple ways, and again continues to get the fundamental facts and therefore the analysis wrong. Prompt: Compare the Space episode of Bluey to Interstel…

You have rolled on from "all the time" to "frequently" to "remarkably easy". They all do not mean the same.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#235

Post by tiltowait »

bootsmann wrote: post #85
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…

> 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.

I work in DevSecOps, and devs sometimes come to us with AI-slop summaries and writeups about our own tooling. Any time I see emojis in a message, I know I'm about to have a laugh.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#236

Post by alfalfasprout »

Insanity wrote: post #11
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…

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…

Wikipedia also didn't have remotely the controls they have today around review + locking contentious articles, etc.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#237

Post by alfalfasprout »

brookst wrote: post #179
thewebguyd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And what makes you think they're short term?

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#238

Post by seattle_spring »

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…

> LLMs, kind of like Bill Bryson's books

I wonder if maybe Malcolm Gladwell would be a more apt comparison?

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#239

Post by kuil009 »

I use LLMs mainly as a mirror for my own thinking, not as a source of authority.

When I explain my ideas to the model during development, I often see flaws or confusion in my own words. This is where I learn the most. The author talks about people who rely on AI for arguments or research. They let the model's smooth, but statistical, language replace their own thinking. Language is naturally uncertain. LLMs just show this uncertainty using statistics. If you understand this, LLMs are no longer a "confidence engine." Instead, they become a tool to fix and improve your thoughts.

A key point is that even if we try hard, we cannot help but react to what the AI says. We must remember that neither AI nor humans are perfect. I believe we should accept AI responses critically and always be skeptical, just like when meeting a stranger.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#240

Post by themadturk »

cratermoon wrote: post #69
tayo42 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is usually close enough and most users don't require perfection for their "facts" Ive noticed things like gemini summaries on Google searches are also generally close enough.

Close enough only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades

And nuclear weapons. Don't forget the nuclear weapons.
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