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Comment by eruleman | Hacker News Reader

"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985

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"What bothers me is, nothing does." - Dixie Flatline in William Gibson's _Neuromancer_, 1984

Wonder if Jobs had read that by 1985.

Really? We just made a version of GPT3 finetuned on the complete works of Plato. It produced some solid new dialogues. About, for instance, the relationship between beauty and the good.

the mind of a person is ever changing. you cant capture it across all their works.

GPT was trained on the works of Dan Dennett. People deeply familiar were asked to select the real reply from a multiple choice of generated replies.

Even the experts were only 50% accurate. I was close to random.

And it is not like Dennett or Plato are going to change their minds at the end of their careers of changing the minds of others.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzx3m/in-experiment-ai-succ...

Out of that whole gang (Pinker, et el), he seems the easiest to GPT3.

Did you just put Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett in "a gang" ?

Wash out your mouth with soap, this instant!

Seriously, is there anything that connects these two other than having written some reasonably accessible books on matters in the realm of cognitive science?

Is there some feud here? I see a lot of crossover in the 2 seconds of googling I just did but know nothing about these people.

Here’s my guess: Pinker writes sometimes on evolutionary psychology. A controversy I heard around the atheism plus days was that evopsych should be banned. Therefore it’s likely that Pinker has been declared cancelled. Thus, to mention his name is to sin, and a sinner must repent, so wash your mouth out with soap and divert yourself from this path of heresy lest you join him.

Completely and utterly wrong.

I just don't see Pinker and Dennett as remotely connected. They don't work in the same field, they don't have much to say about the things the other is interested, and they were not even really on the same page w.r.t. "new atheism".

Hm, let us see. 10 seconds on google and wikipedia revealed:

"Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind."

"Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science."

Not even remotely connected, you say?

Curious, how are Pinker and Dennett opposed wrt. "new atheism"?

Pinker and Dennett were quite chummy at least 15 years ago (along with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) as part of the "New Atheist" movement in addition to their shared interest in cognitive matters. I don't know what they feel about each other today -- there's been quite a lot of infighting and "New Atheism" as a movement has sort of splintered.

For anyone else that wants to try: https://ucriverside.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9Hme3Gzwiv...

I got 40% but I did worse on the questions I spent more time on, so I think I got lucky.

And how was GPT3's Attic Greek? Did you run it by classicists?

That’s the goal is to run a Human GAN, powered by Classicists.

> We just made a version of GPT3 finetuned on the complete works of Plato. It produced some solid new dialogues.

I highly highly doubt that.

New dialogues aren't so hard. They are rehashes of old dialogues. New ideas are hard.

* Is beauty wise, socrates? * Or rather, I will put the question more clearly: We know, do we not, that which is wise must also be good? * Certainly. * And what is good must also be beautiful? * True. * Then where there is wisdom there is goodness and beauty. * Certainly. * But where there is no wisdom there is no goodness. And where there is no goodness there is no beauty. Nor is this only true of the matter which we were discussing, but of all others as well. * I agree. * And therefore, where there is no music, we shall find neither wisdom nor goodness, nor beauty. * I dare say. * And that which has no music is unpleasing to the ear. But the unpleasing is the disagreeable, and the disagreeable is the evil, and therefore in music there is the greatness of goodness, and beauty, and wisdom, and lastly, in all that knowledge which relates to the music and harmony of the soul, which we have escaped to the end of our argument, in that, I fancy, you would place justice. * 19. "And so, glaucon," I said, the cause of every thing, which you want to find, has been found ?" * Certainly," he said. * "And is not that cause beauty?" * "I do not understand you," he said. * "The cause of all things has the name of beauty.”

There are some awkward jumps there to the topic of music, and I suspect it lacks coherence but I didn't want to re-read to the point of fatigue.

That said, the passage and its idea sure are beautiful!

I’m reminded more of this Fry and Laurie sketch than I am of Plato, to be honest.

https://youtu.be/-v79Pw21I8s

That’s a great sketch, thanks for sharing!

Plato would never write this crap.

So a series of sentences with no underlying meaning, written in the style of a socratic dialogue? x)

This concept is explored in-depth in the Hyperion book series. Highly recommended if you like the genre :)

Maybe he should have tried reading some of Aristotle's books.

A slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable.

But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean.

It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.

There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not

Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been

Yes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)

I meant more in the sense that we are primed to take one side of the issue by the default, the one we know. In the counter-factual Socrates-less world I'm describing, we are the unprovable counter-factual and people there are posting about how grateful they are that Eulogothenes' words were put to papyrus.

Perhaps a better way to illustrate this is to point out that the Mona Lisa's cultural prominence essentially ballooned once it was stolen.

A tangent on a tangent.

This is the first time I've read why Socrates didn't leave any writings. Which incidentally reminds me of a saying in Zen Buddhism of "do not establish words and letters" (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_scriptures ) If you squint hard enough, Zen's preferred method of teaching via teacher-student interactions very vaguely resemble the Socratic method.

So I wonder whether there's any more-than-incidental connection between the two, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism -- i.e. was Zen Buddhism a very distant offshoot of the Socratic philosophy and methods?

(Sorry, might be too much of a tangent. But hey, Steve Jobs probably held Zen in high regard :D)

It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate?

Did Plato ever speak about how we wants to communicate ideas to later generations? Maybe he didn't want to, and he trusted his students to preserve and improve his important ideas? How did he expect people far away in time and space to study philosophy without access to great thinkers? Did he not care? Did he expect every niche to reinvent philosophy from scratch?

Thomas Jefferson wanted the US Constitution to be rewritten by 1810, but we are still stuck with it today (with amendments, granted).

>It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate?

oh sure, they include the other side, but amusingly enough the other side are always idiots.

It’s also quite unfortunate that the world needs to keep learning the basic lessons of media with every new communications technology.

The epistemological issues that Socrates had with the written word are not too dissimilar from the epistemological issues of contemporary social media.

Socbae dropping bombs about context collapse

This is probably the best use case for this technology. Although I think there's a lot of potential for very realistic fake news

You dont need fake news to be realistic to be believable. You just need to repeat them over and over again. Works wonders.

Not even that. Just need it to fit a narrative people already had.

That's good for extension and motivation, but not persuasion.

A motivated person will persuade his close friend/family.

That's why this scales well

This is such a great idea. And for me it goes even beyond being able to exploit the intellect of deceased geniuses. It could be the path to generating believable AI personas out of everyday people. If sufficiently accurate know I would love to have an AI with my father's advice and sense of humor once he is no longer with us.

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