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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#251

Post by 1718627440 »

ctoth wrote: post #88
everdrive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world. And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun…

But what is Apache for? You don't just set up Apache to have run Apache? You set it up to serve web content! It is middleware, it is not in of itself useful? Isn't setting up Apache robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn about writing your own HTTP server? In C? And what a bad idea that is? The LLM helping you configure a web server is no different than the web server helping you serve HTTP instead of implement…

Computers have a bunch of abstractions, but they are leaky abstractions. Apache is not leaking that much, so you don't need to write an HTTP server (until you write an Apache module). Abstracting over Apache can be something able to do when all you need to do is host static pages on port 80/443, that's called a Webhoster or github.io .

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#252

Post by 1718627440 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #206
everdrive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world. And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun…

> the distinction is whether or not something enables me to perform a task, or whether it's just doing the task for me. I think school has taught us to believe that if we're assigned a task, and we take a shortcut to avoid doing the task ourselves, that's wrong. And yes, when the purpose is to learn the task or the underlying concepts, that's probably true. But in a job environment, the employer presumably only cares…

When I perform a task myself, it will be reproducible, so it is done once and for all for this employer. That probably won't be the case for the LLM, which will change or might be down next week.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#253

Post by 1718627440 »

dcotter wrote: post #200
everdrive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about that comparison as well. A common fantasy is that civilization will collapse and the guy who knows how to hunt and start a fire will really excel. In practice, this never happens and he's sort of left behind unless he also has other skills relevant to the modern world. And, for instance, I have barely any knowledge of how my computer works, but it's a tool I use to do my job. (and to have fun…

> But for LLMs, my task might be something like "setting up apache is easy, but I've never done it so just tell me how do it so I don't fumble through learning and make it take way longer." The task was setting up Apache. The task was assigned to me, but I didn't really do it. There wasn't necessarily some higher level task that I merely needed Apache for. Apache was the whole task! And I didn't do it! To play devil'…

The alternative to LLMs wouldn't necessarily be to start from scratch, you likely will just start with a documented version from your distro, and change the documented settings suggested. Meanwhile using the documentation, that is also provided by the distro.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#254

Post by chamomeal »

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…

If I use LLMs too much I swear I can feel my brain powering down. Same feeling as playing a really grindy/mindless game

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#255

Post by Chabsff »

zahlman wrote: post #218
ACCount37 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understanding a transistor is an incredibly small part of how Ryzen 9800X3D does what it does. Is it a foundational part? Yes. But if you have it and nothing else, that adds up to knowing almost nothing about how the whole CPU works. And you could come to understand much more than that without ever learning what a "transistor" even is. Understanding low level foundations does not automatically confer the understandin…

My entire point here is that one can , in fact, reasonably claim to "understand" a system without being able to model its high level behaviors. It's not a mistake; it's disagreeing with you about what the word "understand" means.

For the sake of this conversation "understanding" implicitly means "understand enough about it to be unimpressed".

This is what's being challenged: That you can discount LLMs as uninteresting because they are "just" probalistic inference machines. This completely underestimates just how far you can push the concept.

Your pedantic definition of understand might be technically correct. But that's not what's being discussed.

That is, unless you assign metaphysical properties to the notion of intelligence. But the current consensus is that intelligence can be simulated, at least in principle.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#256

Post by Chabsff »

zahlman wrote: post #186
ACCount37 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What more are human brains than piles of wet meat? Calculation isn't what makes us special; that's down to things like consciousness, self-awareness and volition. > The main reason to say "LLMs are just next token predictions" is to stop thinking about all the inconvenient things. Things like... They do it by iteratively predicting the next token. Suppose the calculations to do a more detailed analysis were tractab…

> They do it by iteratively predicting the next token.

You don't know that. It's how the llm presents, not how it does things. That's what I mean by it being the interface.

There's ever only one word that comes out of your mouth at a time, but we don't conclude that humans only think one word at a time. Who's to say the machine doesn't plan out the full sentence and outputs just the next token?

I don't know either fwiw, and that's my main point. There's a lot to criticize about LLMs and, believe or not, I am a huge detractor of their use in most contexts. But this is a bad criticism of them. And it bugs me a lot because the really important problems with them are broadly ignored by this low-effort, ill-thought-out offhand dismissal.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#257

Post by nlawalker »

bob1029 wrote: post #110

I find the biggest crime with LLMs to be the size of the problems we feed them. Every time I start getting lazy and asking ChatGPT things like "write me a singleton that tracks progression for XYZ in a unity project", I wind up with a big hole where some deeper understanding of my problem should be. A better approach is to prompt it like "Show me a few ways to persist progression-like data in a unity project. Compare…

It all depends on what you do with it - I see the first prompt just as a slightly different starting place than the second one.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#258

Post by ramraj07 »

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.

Hey! you called me out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178196

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#259

Post by TeMPOraL »

joquarky wrote: post #243
gspencley wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For better or worse, it's also what makes for reliable systems.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#260

Post by gessha »

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…

I really dislike YouTube on mobile for tutorials because UI is clunky compared to desktop. The information is locked into video frames and audio that are hard to search through and mobile clients aren’t rich enough to search through transcripts and object search through frames.

I much prefer static web pages and text which is why I reach for the LLM hammer.

The way I see the two is as complements. A YouTube video with someone doing something is rich with information but it’s slow to process. A LLM prompt is fast but unreliable. Sometimes the information that in looking for is not in the Internet and I’m actually looking for a plausible hallucination so I can start from somewhere. Tradeoffs.

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