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Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

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Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#431

Post by Lerc »

fmbb wrote: post #329
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

Training on all papers does not mean the model believes or knows the truth. It is just a machine that spits out words.

Um... what truth?

My truth, your truth or some defined objective truth?

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#432

Post by falcor84 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #427
falcor84 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but when I do math without a calculator, my accuracy also drops precipitously whenever they add a digit.

Do you have self awareness to anticipate the drop in your accuracy and refuse to perform the operation?

I do anticipate it, but in the situations I'm asked to do such calculations, I don't usually have the option of refusing, nor would I want to. For most real would situations, it's generally better to arrive at a ballpark solution than to refuse to engage with the problem.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#433

Post by Lerc »

Barrin92 wrote: post #367
danenania wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like an arbitrary distinction. If an LLM can accomplish a task that we’d all agree requires reasoning for a human to do, we can’t call that reasoning just because the mechanics are a bit different?

Yes because it isn't an arbitrary distinction. My good old TI-83 can do calculations that I can't even do in my head but unlike me it isn't reasoning about them, that's actually why it's able to do them so fast, and it has some pretty big implications about what it can't do. If you want to understand where a systems limitations are you need to understand not just what it does but how it does it, I feel like we need t…

Taking a different tack from others in this thread. I don't think you can say that a TI-83 is not reasoning if it is doing calculations. Certainly it is not aware of any concepts of numbers and has no meaningful sense of the operation, but those are attributes of sentience, not reasoning. The reasoning ability of a calculator is extremely limited but what make those capabilities that it does have, non reasoning.

What non-sentience based property do you think something should have to be considered reasoning. Do you consider sentience and reasoning to be one and the same? If not then you should be able to indicate what distinguishes one from the other.

I doubt anyone here is arguing that chatGPT is sentient, yet plenty accept that it can reason to some extent.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#434

Post by pembrook »

bwfan123 wrote: post #293
pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

the machine is fooling you with a mimicry of reasoning. and you are falling for it.

So are all the humans in this thread.

Except, human mimicry of "reasoning" is usually applied in service of justifying an emotional feeling, arguably even less reliable than the non-feeling machine.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#435

Post by mrbungie »

pembrook wrote: post #434
bwfan123 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the machine is fooling you with a mimicry of reasoning. and you are falling for it.

So are all the humans in this thread. Except, human mimicry of "reasoning" is usually applied in service of justifying an emotional feeling, arguably even less reliable than the non-feeling machine.

It has served us relatively fine for thousands of years.

LLMs? I'm waiting for one that knows how not to say something that is clearly wrong with extreme confidence, reasoning or not.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#436

Post by wg0 »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

> “the AI has no ground truth”

Yeah? It has? Where the irrefutable proof of that?

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#437

Post by throwaway290 »

falcor84 wrote: post #432
throwaway290 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have self awareness to anticipate the drop in your accuracy and refuse to perform the operation?

I do anticipate it, but in the situations I'm asked to do such calculations, I don't usually have the option of refusing, nor would I want to. For most real would situations, it's generally better to arrive at a ballpark solution than to refuse to engage with the problem.

Ballpark solution is in a way refusing...

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#438

Post by yapyap »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

> “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever

it does not, AI is predicting the next ‘token’ based on the last ‘token’. There is no sentience, it’s machine learning except the machines are really strong.

It’d be illogical to say an AI has a ground truth just because it ‘ingested’ every paper ever.

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#439

Post by [deleted] »

pjs_ wrote: post #288

Not sure why everyone rates this. It’s full of very confidently made statements like “the AI has no ground truth” (obviously it does, it has ingested every paper ever), it “can’t reason logically” which seems like a stretch if you ever read the CoT of a frontier reasoning model and “can’t explain how they arrived at conclusions” where - I mean just try it yourself with o1, go as deep as you like asking how it arrived…

[deleted]

Re: Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

#440

Post by [deleted] »

ctbergstrom wrote: post #286
patja wrote: post #211

I'm uncomfortable with the use of profanity as a core element of this campaign branding, especially given that it seems to be an educational outreach effort. While this seems targeted at college age and above, I think it would be highly relevant content for a teen audience as well. While I swear in privacy on occasion I think it has no place in the classroom. I really don't care for it in the workplace either but I g…

This is something we've given serious consideration, having taught a course called "Calling Bullshit" ( http://callingbullshit.org ) for almost a decade and having authored a book by the same name that gets downranked on various Amazon features because of its title. But the bullshit is a term of art here, after the seminal 1986 article "On Bullshit" by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt (later published as a littl…

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