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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#241

Post by AlexCoventry »

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…

That's partly because they are getting more reliable, though, just as WP did.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#242

Post by hopelite »

ecocentrik wrote: post #106
ok_dad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original rule when I was a lad (when wikipedia was a baby) was, "don't trust stuff on the internet, especially Wikipedia where people can change it at will." Today they might have better trust for Wikipedia-- and I know I use it as a source of truth for a lot of things-- but back in my day teachers were of the opinion that it couldn't be trusted. This was for like middle and high school, not college or university…

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…

[dead]

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#243

Post by joquarky »

gspencley wrote: post #173
ecocentrik wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure but I hope you get my point. Fighting takes effort, cooperation takes effort. Most people have other things to worry about and don't care about whatever it is you're fighting or cooperating over. People aren't motivated enough to try and sabotage the wikipedia articles of others. Even if they could automate it. There's just nothing in it for them.

The opposite of love and hatered is apathy.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#244

Post by jumploops »

dfxm12 wrote: post #139
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…

As always, trust, but verify! Google maps lists "made up" places or outdated info. AI isn't scouting these locations physically... Of course, at that point, the real question is, what's the value difference (taking into account personal, external and social costs) between asking chatgpt and /r/rockhounding (or whatever message boards they frequent)? At least if you start a thread on reddit, you might meet other peopl…

One of the reasons I love rockhounding is that most of the information is _not_ online, but there is quite a bit of print literature from the last century that hasn't seemed to be scanned.

My recommendation for newcomers is to find a local rockhounding club and start there. Some of the places listed in the old books are no longer publicly accessible, so best to tread carefully!

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#245

Post by spacecadet »

Also says people are not using AI for anything meaningful. If you are trying to use AI in any meaningful way you are hyper skeptical of it and always trying to refine your dataset and understand its outputs. Anything less is mindless consumption, no different from any Joe Internet Consumer.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#246

Post by yannyu »

ACCount37 wrote: post #130
yannyu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then why not say "they are just computer programs"? LLMs are probabilistic or non-deterministic computer programs, plenty of people say this. That is not much different than saying "LLMs are probabilistic next-token prediction based on current context". > I think the reason people don't say that is because they want to say "I already understand what they are, and I'm not impressed and it's nothing new". But what th…

> But we already know the inner workings. Overconfident and wrong. No one understands how an LLM works. Some people just delude themselves into thinking that they do. Saying "I know how LLMs work because I read a paper about transformer architecture" is about as delusional as saying "I read a paper about transistors, and now I understand how Ryzen 9800X3D works". Maybe more so. It takes actual reverse engineering wor…

I never claimed we already know everything about LLMs. Knowing "everything about" anything these days is impossible given the complexity of our technology. Even antennae, a centuries old technology, is something we're still innovating on and don't completely understand in all domains.

But that's a categorically different statement than "no one understands how an LLM works", because we absolutely do.

You're spending a lot of time describing whether we know or don't know LLMs, but you're not talking at all about what it is that you think we do or do not understand. Instead of describing what you think the state of the knowledge is about LLMs, can you talk about what it is that you think that is unknown or not understood?

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#247

Post by versteegen »

jjk166 wrote: post #153
gowld wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attr…

What about scholarly encyclopedias? For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The articles are written in the style of a survey article, and if they're merely tertiary, I can't tell. If the intention behind a citation is a reference for a concept (an "existence proof" of it) rather than identifying its source or providing evidence, then a tertiary source such as to a textbook seems adequate.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#248

Post by malshe »

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.

I suspect a majority of my students this semester used LLMs to complete homework assignments. It is really depressing. I spent hours making these assignments and all they probably did was to copy and paste them into ChatGPT. The worst part is when they write to me asking for help, sharing their code, and I can see it was written by LLMs. The errors are mostly there because occasionally the assignments refer to something we did in the class. Without that context LLMs make assumptions and the code fails to generate the exact output. So now I am fixing the part of the code that some of my students didn't bother to write themselves.

Edit: Added "I suspect" in the beginning as I can't prove it.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#249

Post by danparsonson »

turtletontine wrote: post #181
pants2 wrote: post #57

I've seen this! Following some Math and Physics subreddits it's a regular occurrence for a new submitter to come in and post some 40 pages of incomprehensible bullshit and claim that they developed a unifying theory of physics with ChatGPT and that ChatGPT has told them it's a breakthrough in the field. Of course that used to happen regularly before LLMs but not nearly as often.

Including the former CEO of Uber. I’m somewhat curious what these people even think they’ve discovered, what outstanding problem they think they’ve actually solved… but I’m not curious enough to actually dig through their slop. https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-c...

"Vibe physics" good lord... It's like reading the thoughts of a five year old - absolutely certain that they know how the world works with little or no basis in reality.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#250

Post by borroka »

agumonkey wrote: post #31
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…

Most of the time it feels like a crutch to me. There has been a few moments where it unlocked deep motivation (by having a feel for the size of a solution based on chatgpt output) and one time a research project where any crazy idea I threw, it would imagine what it would entail in terms of semantics and then I was inspired even more. The jury is Still out on what value these things will bring

I have found them to be very useful.

Here are just a few examples of how I have used them.

My fountain pen stopped working, so I tried the common solutions recommended, but they did not solve the problem. Claude told me to try using a mixture of window cleaner and water. It worked! (The solution must have been in the corpus used to train Claude.)

I switched from W2 to consulting, but I didn't know anything about taxes. ChatGPT gave me the right recommendation, saving me hours of research.

I wanted to evaluate the quality of some shirts I have, so I used ChatGPT to estimate stitches per inch and the quality of the buttonholes and other details.

I planned my diet using ChatGPT. I had it calculate calories, macros, and deficit. Could I have done it without an LLM? Of course, but it made the planning much faster.

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