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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#281

Post by fc417fc802 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #263
bonoboTP wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absurd claim. Show me the translation benchmark where you saw such a result.

Does "every time I've challenged people about this on Hacker News" count as a benchmark? See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35531558 .

No, it doesn't. I don't find the linked thread remotely convincing regarding your (frankly preposterous) claim that preexisting non-deep-learning solutions are better at translation in the general case.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that once fine tuned by a human for a specific language pair that such systems are better at performing literal translation. But the value proposition of deep learning here is that you don't need a large team of experts to laboriously train a given language pair, that the entire training process is largely unsupervised, and that the translations aren't hopelessly literal. The ML algorithms can pick up on idioms given a sufficiently large dataset.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#282

Post by altruios »

RankingMember wrote: post #257
nathan_compton wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning stuff is cool?

I think learning stuff and making art just for the hell of it is going to become a lot more accepted as society continues on and more and more peoples' jobs get automated away. Obviously that's a huge simplification of a much more complex situation, but in general I think the best future is one where people are free to pursue interests without regard for those interests ability to pay for their food and housing.

UBI: the dream!

Decoupling working from living: means only intrinsically valuable things get worked on. No more working a 9-5 at a scam call center or figuring out how to make people click on ads. There is ONLY BENEFIT (to everyone) from giving labor such leverage.

Not every job needs to or should even exist: everyone having a job isn't utopia. Utopia is being free to choose what you work on. This directs market value for labor to go up. Work that needs to get done will be aligned with financial incentives (farmers, janitors, repair industries would soar to new heights).

UBI is a necessary and great idea: A bottom floor to capitalism means we all can stand up and lift this sinking ship.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#283

Post by s1artibartfast »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #249
s1artibartfast wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job. The problem with the modern educational system is that it isnt very efficient at this task. Instead, most of the value relies on the screening that took place before the students even entered the institution, not the knowledge obtained while there.

> There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job. That can't be the only goal. We also need to transmit culture, values, and teach them to become citizens.

you dont need 4-10 years of post-secondary school at 100k/yr to do that.

nor do our current institutions do a good job of what you describe.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#284

Post by shermantanktop »

physicsguy wrote: post #168
shermantanktop wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for each of those dozens, there are now millions of untalented people who can generate terrible films with a few clicks. How does a Tarantino, or even one of your new talents, ever get discovered? The friction is a feature, not a bug.

> The friction is a feature, not a bug. The friction means only wealthy people can do anything in a sphere.

We've seen unprecedented democratization of media over the last 30 years, primarily due to the internet. I'm personally not seeing a corresponding positive impact on cultural creativity. I see a lot of tweets and a lot of Etsy stores, and the audience for long novels (for example) is aging out.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#285

Post by School-Cotton »

lapcat wrote: post #256
School-Cotton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you decide who to filter into the more difficult and faster-paced classes that will prepare someone to be a pure mathematician, other than grades?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "filter into" or at what level or stage of classes you're referring to. To a large extent, it's self-filtering: who is going to voluntarily take advanced math classes except those who are intered in advanced math? There are of course larger societal questions of how much schooling is funded by the government and how much needs to be self-funded. I don't know if this is what you'r…

You need to filter them way before that. Certainly by 16, probably even earlier like 12 or 13, someone destined for a career in STEM will be bored and wasting time by any material that 90% of people are capable of learning.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#286

Post by aleph_minus_one »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #273
Balgair wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system: Now the real question is the costs. In that, can you somehow make this system work at scale with the same profit as before? I know that the German system is a lot different than in the US, including things like tracking in 9th grade and below. But the real question is if the Universiti…

It's not clever, it's pointless red tape. I don't know if it's different in Germany but at least at US universities most higher level courses are part of a sequence and are thus only offered at a specific time of year. Thus failing delays your degree by a year and creates all sorts of logistical issues for the student. Doing that more than 3 times would be absurd, and anyway the sort of student who has 3 F's on his t…

> but at least at US universities most higher level courses are part of a sequence and are thus only offered at a specific time of year. Thus failing delays your degree by a year and creates all sorts of logistical issues for the student.

This often also holds in Germany. And indeed if you thus fail an exam, your degree is delayed and you might have logistical issues.

The moral of this: learn hard so that you don't fail exams. :-)

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#287

Post by wizzwizz4 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #281
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "every time I've challenged people about this on Hacker News" count as a benchmark? See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35531558 .

No, it doesn't. I don't find the linked thread remotely convincing regarding your (frankly preposterous) claim that preexisting non-deep-learning solutions are better at translation in the general case. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that once fine tuned by a human for a specific language pair that such systems are better at performing literal translation. But the value proposition of deep learning here is that you don…

Found the other good post in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532941. Google Translate and DeepL were capable of mostly-accurate Japanese translation two (or even 5) years ago (as seen in my previous link). Multiple people ran this text through GPT-4, and none of its translations were any good, as assessed by this Japanese-speaker.

There's a reason we needed the Rosetta stone to give as an in for translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. You can't just throw Big Data at the problem and expect it to give accurate results. Dedicated translation setups can get good results, but ChatGPT's ilk doesn't.

Convincing translations are not the same thing as accurate translations. RLHF optimises for convincing, not accurate.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#288

Post by tsunamifury »

renewiltord wrote: post #250
tsunamifury wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?

It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even approached understanding what they are saying. Among those, fewer still have validated their assumptions. Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a specific hardware platform because that was the one that was (in this field) clos…

I agree but the signal noise ratio is slightly better here. But it’s fine down hill over the decade.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#289

Post by lapcat »

School-Cotton wrote: post #285
lapcat wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "filter into" or at what level or stage of classes you're referring to. To a large extent, it's self-filtering: who is going to voluntarily take advanced math classes except those who are intered in advanced math? There are of course larger societal questions of how much schooling is funded by the government and how much needs to be self-funded. I don't know if this is what you'r…

You need to filter them way before that. Certainly by 16, probably even earlier like 12 or 13, someone destined for a career in STEM will be bored and wasting time by any material that 90% of people are capable of learning.

I still don't know what you mean by "filter". I asked, and you haven't elaborated.

The only thing I can think of is that you (mistakenly) assume that I'm suggesting all students must move at the same pace? But that would be a very weird interpretation of me, since I've already expressed strong criticism of that idea: "Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track."

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#290

Post by School-Cotton »

lapcat wrote: post #289
School-Cotton wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to filter them way before that. Certainly by 16, probably even earlier like 12 or 13, someone destined for a career in STEM will be bored and wasting time by any material that 90% of people are capable of learning.

I still don't know what you mean by "filter". I asked, and you haven't elaborated. The only thing I can think of is that you (mistakenly) assume that I'm suggesting all students must move at the same pace? But that would be a very weird interpretation of me, since I've already expressed strong criticism of that idea: "Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion.…

Sort students into different classes based on their ability and interest.
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