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LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

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Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#291

Post by moffkalast »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #67
moffkalast wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why stop at newspapers, it's been a while since one could say books have any integrity, pretty much anyone can get anything into print these days. From political shenanigans to self help books designed to confirm people's biases to sell more units. Video's by far the hardest to fake but that's changing as well. Regardless of what media you get your info from you have to be selective of what sources you trust. It'…

The problem is that LLM output is so incredibly confident in tone. It really sounds like you're talking to an expert who has years of experience and has done the research for you - and tech companies push this angle quite hard. That's bad when their output can be complete garbage at times.

Exactly, you are absolutely right!

Kidding aside, it's a good rule of thumb to distrust someone who appears very confident, even with people. Especially if they can't explain their reasoning. There are so many experts who are going to confidently tell you how it is based on their three decade old outdated knowledge that's of very questionable accuracy.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#292

Post by agumonkey »

borroka wrote: post #250
agumonkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 taxe…

hmm true, for personal investigation / learning, chatgpt became a better google

especially large, old, convoluted domains where you want to be able to quickly map where things are, it's indeed a massive time saver

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#293

Post by WingedBadger »

malshe wrote: post #248
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 someth…

Just going by the last 2 years of university teaching (energy focused computer science in germany), I feel like LLMs have already had a devastating effect. There has been a large influx of students who seemingly got through their entire Bachelors degree with nothing but ChatGPT. The university is slow to adapt and ill equipped to deal with this.

This is absolutely killing my enjoyment of teaching. There is nothing more disheartening than carefully preparing materials for people to grasp concepts I find extremely interesting, just for them to hand in ChatGPT generated slop and not understanding anything at all. In stark contrast, just a couple of years prior I would have quite rewarding projects and discussions with students. I also refuse to give detailed feedback on such "solutions" anymore because the asymmetry in student effort and my effort is just completely unreasonable.

This development is something very different from the often quipped "graphing calculator in maths education". For a graphing calculator you still need to know the mathematical foundations to input the correct things to get the correct results. LLMs are mostly used by just pasting in the exercise of the day.

This is not to say LLMs can't be a useful tool for learning. They absolutely can. But that is not how the majority of students uses them... to their own detriment and the detriment of those trying to teach them.

If universities don't adapt to this quickly, then the already weak signal of "university degree implies some amount of competence" will be entirely lost.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#294

Post by mzajc »

gowld wrote: post #90
miningape wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong" This comes from decades of teachers misremembering what the rule was, and eventually it morphed into the Wikipedia specific form we see today - the actual rule is that you cannot cite an encyclopaedia in an academic paper. full stop. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and therefore should not be cited. Wikipedia is the only en…

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.)

> (Wikipedia has the additional problem that, by default, the version cited is the ever-changing "latest" version, not a fixed and identified version.)

Only citing means copying the URL directly. If you use Wikipedia's "Cite this page" or an external reference management tool (e.g. Zotero), the current page ID will be appended to the URL.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#295

Post by chmod775 »

malshe wrote: post #248
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 someth…

Why are you fixing their code? You're just doing the same thing as the LLM you're complaining about.

Also, as someone who attended university in Germany, the mental image of a professor helping undergrads with homework already seems strange if not funny to me. That is... at least I hope they're undergrads, because if people managed to get any sort of CS degree while having to rely on a LLM to code I might be sick.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#296

Post by Chabsff »

LeroyRaz wrote: post #274
Chabsff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fw…

Have you read the literature? Do you have a background in machine learning or statistics? Yes. We know that LLMs can be trained by predicting the next token. This is a fact. You can look up the research papers, and open source training code. I can't work it out, are you advocating a conspiracy theory that these models are trained with some elusive secret and that the researchers are lying to you? Being trained by pre…

> Have you read the literature? Do you have a background in machine learning or statistics?

Very much so. Decades.

> Being trained by predicting one token at a time is also not a criticism??! It is just a factually correct description...

Of course that's the case. The objection I've had from the very first post in this thread is that using this trivially obvious fact as evidence that LLMs are boring/uninteresting/not AI/whatever is missing the forest for the trees.

"We understand [the I/Os and components of] LLMs, and what they are is nothing special" is the topic at hand. This is reductionist naivete. There is a gulf of complexity, in the formal mathematical sense and reductionism's arch-enemy, that is being handwaved away.

People responding to that with "but they ARE predicting one token at a time" are either falling into the very mistake I'm talking about, or are talking about something else entirety.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#297

Post by Brendinooo »

gtowey wrote: post #87
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…

> Why are these different than using LLMs? I would say that with a computer you're using a tool to take care of mundane details and speed up the mechanics of tasks in your life. Such as writing a document, or playing a game. I can't think of a way I would be seriously disadvantaged by not having the ability to hand-write an essay or have games I can readily play without a computer. Computers are more like tools in th…

>But for many people, LLMs replace critical thinking...[and] outsourc[e] planning, research, and generating ideas

Sure, but I guess you could say that any tech advancement outsources these things, right? I don't have to think about what gear to pick when I drive a car to maximize its performance, I don't have to think about "i before e" types of rules when spell check will catch it, I don't have to think about how to maintain a draft horse or think as much about types of dirt or terrain difficulties when I have a tractor.

Or, to add another analogy, for something like a digital photo compared to film photography that you'd develop yourself or portrait painting before that: so much planning and critical thought has been lost.

And then there's another angle: does a project lead not outsource much of this to other people? This invites a "something human is being lost" critique in a social/developmental context, but people don't really lament that the CEO has somehow lost his humanity because he's outsourcing so much of the process to others.

I'm not trying to be clever or do gotchas or anything. I'm genuinely wrestling with this stuff. Because you might be right: dependence on LLMs might be bad. (Though I'd suggest that this critique is blunted if we're able to eventually move to hosting and running this stuff locally.) But I'm already dependent on a ton of tech in ways I probably can't even fully grasp.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#298

Post by jermaustin1 »

jalapenos wrote: post #278
jermaustin1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember all of our encyclopedias being decades out of date growing up. My parents bought a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica in 1976 or something like that, so by the time I was reading the Encyclopedia for research on papers in the late 90s and early 00s, it was without a doubt less factual than even the earliest incarnation of Wikipedia was. Either way, you are correct, we weren't allowed to cite any encyclopedia,…

> we weren't allowed to even look at it (blocked from school computers) Same thing happened with ChatGPT - teachers hate competition

I agree about blocking ChatGPT though. Kids (and most adults, honestly) aren't "smart" enough to understand the limitations, and trust it, and wikipedia, without question.

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#299

Post by kayge »

hathawsh wrote: post #94
GMoromisato wrote: post #44

Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…

Most of HN has probably seen this gem about "thinking meat", but in case you haven't: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Also a great read-through of this by H. Jon Benjamin (Archer / Bob's Burgers) and Maeve Higgins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4

Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

#300

Post by clown_strike »

ok_dad wrote: post #190
ecocentrik wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry When Wikipedia was founded, it was much easier to change articles without notice. There may not have been 1000s of experts at the time, like there are today. There's also other things that Wikipedia does to ensure articles are accurate today that they may not have done or been able to do decades ago. I am not making a judgment of W…

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