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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#451

Post by bccdee »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #415
bccdee wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Columbus thought he had found India, even after other, smarter people had told him otherwise. You can't give him too much credit, especially given that he was considered a monster even by contemporary monsters like Isabella I of Spain, his sponsor, who founded the Spanish Inquisition and still thought his treatment of the Taino natives was unconscionable. She wanted him to convert them to Christianity, a…

Those are all good arguments against praising Columbus. Especially his insistence that he had found India is a strong argument against saying he discovered America. The specific argument “but it's not a discovery because it was already inhabited” is a particularly literal-minded child applying their teacher’s prohibitions on plagiarism to the real world.

It just feels like an odd gotcha to me. You're not wrong, but the literal meaning of "discovery" was never what those conversations were about.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#452

Post by bccdee »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #152
hammock wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. What does that mean, I’m curious? The schools and university I grew up in had a “single-sanction honor code” which meant if you were caught lying or cheating even once you would be expelled. And you signed the honor code at the top of every test. My more progressive friends at other schools who didn’t have an honor code happily poo-pooed it as a repugnantly ha…

I don’t see the problem. I’m not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from Wikipedia or World Book. Maybe? and if the question is “did the student actually write this?” (which is different than “do they understand it?” there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student understands the material…that don’t involve submitting typed text but still involve communicating clearly. If we allow LLMs- like we a…

Do you really not see the problem? A student who pastes an essay prompt into an input box and copies out the response has learned nothing. Even direct plagiarism from Wikipedia would typically need to be reworked; there will rarely be a Wikipedia page corresponding to your teacher's specific essay prompt.

Students are also poor writers. Often LLM-generated essays can be spotted in elementary school because they write too well for that grade level. A good student will surpass a chatbot, but not if they use it as a crutch while it's still a stronger writer than they are.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#453

Post by jonplackett »

fennecbutt wrote: post #435
jonplackett wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years. One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board. But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone.…

Do all of you replying to me also weep for expensive hand woven fabrics? You're all wearing the fruits of automatic looms. It's the same thing. You own cars, do you weep for the horse industry? Stables, farriers, blacksmiths, leatherworkers/saddlers, ostlers, grooms, etc. What is an art now becomes a functional ubiquity later. Everything took "insight and effort" because everything was handmade, it's an innate featur…

This is also a pointless comparison.

Horses weren’t art. They were a way to get somewhere.

The whole problem with AI is it’s trying to automate the things people LIKE to do and take their life meaning from instead of the things that no one likes doing - like pulling a carriage or a plough.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#454

Post by abathologist »

zaphirplane wrote: post #429
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

There are a lot simpler ways of expressing what you are trying to say. I played a bit taking the text feeding it to LLM to simplify then converting the simple version into a more dense complex wording. What’s the point of my post you ask ? I like stories - Homer Simpson

How do you know that generated text is actually a compression of what the author is trying to say?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#455

Post by parodysbird »

fennecbutt wrote: post #435
jonplackett wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone just the other day told me about how they used to have a group WhatsApp where they’d share these hand made memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It went on for years. One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made with AI - initially it’s great, it’s much better quality than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board. But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone.…

Do all of you replying to me also weep for expensive hand woven fabrics? You're all wearing the fruits of automatic looms. It's the same thing. You own cars, do you weep for the horse industry? Stables, farriers, blacksmiths, leatherworkers/saddlers, ostlers, grooms, etc. What is an art now becomes a functional ubiquity later. Everything took "insight and effort" because everything was handmade, it's an innate featur…

How is what the same thing? Fabric production vs social communication? I don't really see what is the relation here.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#456

Post by Aerbil313 »

abathologist wrote: post #444
Aerbil313 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system…

As a matter of fact, I don't think its true that > if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. But I also think that this claim is (1) practically impossible to prove and (2) a claim we morally ought to attempt to disprove.

Highly recommend to read the full manifesto. The reason is game theory for why human civilization will increasingly automate until human autonomy is reduced to nil, which is the state of suffering he is talking about. If you don't automate, $ENEMY will. So you automate. If you still choose to not automate, $ENEMY wins and controls you, and they will automate ever more with your resources. In fact, these 3 sentences are a good summary of past 1000 years of history, possibly more. See the recent AI 2027 paper (https://ai-2027.com/) for a more detailed approach. And Kaczynski talked about this stuff in the 70s.

For the (2), I want to ask where did you get the idea that people have a moral responsibility to unconditionally defend the progress of technology?

Do you think new technologies' good or bad impact depend entirely on the virtue of the people using them? Do you think new tools dictate their own usage on society when they make contact with constants like immediate-reward-seeking human neurological system?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#457

Post by overflow897 »

There are parts of this I agree with and parts I do not. Being able to "talk" to documentation rather than dig through it to try to understand a concept feels like a way more efficient way to get to the same end.

I think digging through forums or comments or SEO garbage to try to find answers is a nightmare compared to having a solid llm do it for you. Being able to ask to explain a concept 5 different ways or compare concepts is incredible.

Or say - knowing nothing about 3d printing and being able to just ask it about current capabilities, materials, costs etc as an entrypoint. There are whole business ideas I wouldn't even consider exploring without it because it would be so overwhelming to research from scratch.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#458

Post by etruong42 »

I've been treating the LLM as a conversational partner rather than as a "superhuman brain augmentation". Their output still needs to be digested and deeply challenged. If their idea seems finished and polished, perhaps we are treating it too much like a brain augmentation where we too readily accept the things that our brain produces. Production of great ideas require different ideas to be challenged. Great ideas are not just the polishing of mediocre ideas.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#459

Post by Pent »

I feel the same way as the author but also notice that many in this thread are projecting their personal motivations for why they might think or blog onto the author, interesting from a psychological POV
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