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Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

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Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#61

Post by OgsyedIE »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #60

Is this an ai written article? > In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship.

Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.

Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#62

Post by adamgordonbell »

LinchZhang wrote: post #30
ayaros wrote: post #21

I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them! I loved Arrival but never r…

OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories! Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided. In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first…

> simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different

yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.

It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#63

Post by alexey-salmin »

kmonsen wrote: post #42
alexey-salmin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia. Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not…

I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better. The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.

Slavery made a lot of economic sense prior to the industrial revolution. If you consider "good and evil" as a set of norms that help society to thrive (as in outcompete other societies for resources) then it's not surprising that slavery went from good to bad as the technology progressed.

That's the only remotely rational view of it that I'm aware of. "Remotely" because without some kind of religion it doesn't follow that outcompeting other societies or survival in general is "good".

So in the end yes, I do believe "good and evil" are made up. Luckily, it's not a bad thing.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#64

Post by lxgr »

> I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#65

Post by LinchZhang »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #61
lll-o-lll wrote: post #60

Is this an ai written article? > In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship. Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GP…

This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#66

Post by LinchZhang »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #60

Is this an ai written article? > In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now. Note the specific wording was "appear to" because I wasn't sure.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#67

Post by motohagiography »

It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff.

Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#68

Post by OgsyedIE »

LinchZhang wrote: post #65
OgsyedIE wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship. Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GP…

This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.

I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes.

If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#69

Post by LinchZhang »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #68
LinchZhang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.

I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes. If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.

checking logprobs doesn't seem weird to me, it was the priming that was weird.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#70

Post by jimmcslim »

adaml_623 wrote: post #38

I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".

Maybe, but I did come to the article hoping to learn that he had just published another collection of short stories, but alas not.
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