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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

* 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.”

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!

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!

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

Plato would never write this crap.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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