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Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#71

Post by LeCompteSftware »

dpark wrote: post #57
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that LLMs often score as "more human" than actual humans is a downstream consequence of ELIZA tricking people into thinking it had a glimmer of consciousness. The Turing test was refuted because it was proven scientifically meaningless in the 1960s, and LLMs only reinforce that.

What refutation are you referring to? Surely you can cite how it was "proven scientifically meaningless" some 6 decades ago.

I did with the Weizenbaum link, but here's a specific refutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

The Turing Test is totally meaningless, as was conclusively demonstrated some 6 decades ago. It is a test that measures how well your program can fool humans, which means "intelligence of the computer" is hopelessly conflated with "social engineering chops of the humans who programmed the computer." Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science. Actual science involves updating your priors based on evidence.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#72

Post by dpark »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #71
dpark wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What refutation are you referring to? Surely you can cite how it was "proven scientifically meaningless" some 6 decades ago.

I did with the Weizenbaum link, but here's a specific refutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect The Turing Test is totally meaningless, as was conclusively demonstrated some 6 decades ago. It is a test that measures how well your program can fool humans, which means "intelligence of the computer" is hopelessly conflated with "social engineering chops of the humans who programmed the computer." Any comput…

I must have missed your earlier link.

Eliza did not disprove the Turing test, though. What it showed is that it’s easy to pass a very scoped test that doesn’t allow the user to actually broach general topics. Anyone communicating with Eliza for general conversation should quickly discover that it’s running a script. Just “What time is it?” breaks the script.

The Turing test was never that a computer could convincingly simulate a human convincingly in a very narrowly scoped scenario. Certainly the Eliza effect is interesting because it shows that people can assume emotion where it doesn’t exist (they do the same for other humans, by the way), but it does not disprove the Turing test.

> Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science.

This sentiment seems to be expressed a lot from people who want to insist machines can’t be conscious. This retreat to shaming those who disagree is a tacit admission of a weak position.

Convince with logic and facts if you have them.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#73

Post by novemp »

luke5441 wrote: post #66
novemp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few high-profile Muslims spoke out against Harris. This means every Muslim American voted for Trump. Obviously.

He's a Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian, not a Muslim.

It's an even stupider assumption, then!

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#74

Post by luke5441 »

novemp wrote: post #73
luke5441 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian, not a Muslim.

It's an even stupider assumption, then!

He had a few tweets about how Trump is better for peace in the middle east (https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1847252132665114887 ). And then he posted about "voting against genocide" https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1849547336143245549/photo/1 . That's when I unfollowed him and that's where the assumption is coming from.

( Also note the "Trump comes out against regime change in Iran: We can’t get totally involved…We can’t even run ourselves" thing in the first post, lol)

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#75

Post by jrm4 »

imiric wrote: post #22
jrm4 wrote: post #12

Entirely unsurprising. At the risk of whatever, your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. Even people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson don't go on and on about "atheism" for a reason; there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."

> your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity. > there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing." Sure, and yet theism is part of 75%…

Again, I'm more talking about "atheism in effect" than I am "textbook definition."

I'd say, sure, it's reasonable to discuss, but it's often overblown. The older I get, the less significance "atheism" feels like it has just about anywhere.

No shade to anyone, but I have very little interest in "internal beliefs that seem not to affect people much," which atheism seems to fall square into.

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#76

Post by codeulike »

cv5005 wrote: post #63
codeulike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s Are you sure? Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs The Imitation Game: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk…

Yeah I dont think a single current LLM would fool me in a turing test - I would obiously use all kinds of prompt injection techniques, ask about 'dangerous' or controversial topics, ask about random niche facts in varied fields, etc.

Thats a good point actually, I hadn't thought about deploying hacks and jailbreaks in a turing test but thats exactly what should be done, if its being done adversarially

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#77

Post by HDBaseT »

nwhnwh wrote: post #29
imiric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity. > there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing." Sure, and yet theism is part of 75%…

"but an absence of belief in a deity" nope.

What is atheism then in your view?

Re: Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion: The great skeptic gets taken in

#78

Post by HDBaseT »

xvxvx wrote: post #51
elch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans have souls, do other organisms have them too? Is this a trait unique to Homo sapiens? Did Neanderthals, for example, have souls? And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?

The soul is what makes a being alive. Every living being has a soul.

What exactly proves this claim?

Can we measure souls?

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