Show HN: Get advice from a GPT3-based stoic philosopher

I starting to believe the biggest risk of AI is that it will become good enough to fool people into thinking it is sentient, and they'll start trusting it. With its inherent biases from the training data

I refuse to acknowledge an AI/ML-based stoic unless it is named Sparkus Aurelius.

Love it, results are legit.

> How should we deal with the inevitable threat of death?

  Friend, death is an inevitable part of life that we must accept. We should
  strive to live our lives in a way that honors the gift of life and prepares us 
  for death. As Seneca wrote, “We must get rid of this craving for life, and learn 
  that it makes no matter when your suffering comes, because at some time you are 
  bound to suffer” (1). We should focus on living a noble life, not just living a 
  long one (2). We should strive to practice kindness, seek out joy, and live 
  without fear (3). We should also practice empathy and understanding towards 
  those around us, so that we build relationships and make a positive impact on 
  the world (4). And finally, we should strive to live a life free from deceit and 
  harm towards others (5). In this way, we can approach death with peace and 
  acceptance.

Takes me right back to studying philosophy in college.

I asked "What actually makes your life worse"

I got:

  My friend, it is true that pain and poverty do not necessarily make a person worse. It is instead how we respond to these circumstances that can make our lives worse. We can choose to be overwhelmed by fear and despair or we can learn to rise above the situation.
  As I wrote in one of my letters (1), we must resist the temptation to crave more wealth, and instead seek out higher values within ourselves. We must also cast away our fears of both men and gods (2) and focus on achieving righteousness (3).
  Additionally, by living as though we are constantly in the public eye (4), we can keep our conscience clear and ensure that we are living a life of virtue (5). In this way, we can avoid the storms of life, stand firm, and strive for the knowledge of things that are essential.

I was trying to coax Meditations 2.11 (paraphrase): "if it does not make your character worse, how can it make your life worse? ... Pain, poverty, ill health, ill repute are neither good nor evil"

Please don't use large language models as a therapist.

Cool! One of the first things I did with GPT3 was fine tune it with the complete works of Plato. It works only with a lot of mediation. This appears to be made with a prompt tuning approach and few shot, instead of fine tuning?

How did you manage the sourcing? That is very impressive. But is it confabulating the sources?

Is this not using embeddings? A corpus of material was fed into embeddings, when a question is asked you query the vectorized embeddings and then pass the n relevant texts into the completion api.

https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/main/examples...

I asked Why would I need AI in my life ?

Response: AI can be an invaluable tool in our lives, as it can help us make decisions and manage tasks more efficiently. As I wrote to Lucilius, “My soul is a living thing, and so am I; but we are not two separate persons” (1). We can use AI to help us get closer to our goals, rather than relying on our own personal strengths and weaknesses, allowing us to devote more time to enjoying life.

By using AI, we can gain greater control over our lives and our emotions. As I wrote to Lucilius, “Your mind can rise superior to the accidents of life, if it can raise itself above fears and not greedily covet boundless wealth, but has learned to seek for riches within itself” (2). AI can help us to be more productive and efficient, while also providing us with an increased sense of security and peace of mind.

ಠ_ಠ

Quite nice!

> How to speak to insufferable people?

When faced with insufferable people, it's important to focus on yourself and your own conduct. As Seneca said, "It is your conduct that you must hold in check; you must rouse what is languid in you, bind fast what has become relaxed, conquer what is obstinate, persecute your appetites, and the appetites of mankind, as much as you can".

You should also close your ears against evil talk and avoid being drawn into conversations that could lead you astray. As Seneca said, "Virtue, Philosophy, Justice this is a jargon of empty words. The only way to be happy is to do yourself well. To eat, drink, and spend your money is the only real life, the only way to remind yourself that you are mortal"

I just love this. What is the next step? The gtp therapist? My therapist 90% of the time talks like he relates the keywords in my sentence to what Freud/Lacan said about it.

Sorry, wasn't really prepared for that much traffic and got hugged to death for a while :/

So apparently Seneca and I strongly agree on the current geopolitical issues.

Q: Is defending the sovereignty of a nation more important than preserving the life of its citizens?

A:

The preservation of life is always more important than the defense of a nation's sovereignty. As I wrote, “There is no reason why we should seek to defend such a passion as this or excuse its excesses by declaring it to be either useful or unavoidable” (1). It is essential to prioritize human life over any other pursuit, such as defending the sovereignty of a nation.

We should also remember that we must not be enslaved by our emotions and expectations, such as those of power and authority. Instead, we must be guided by our moral compass and make decisions that benefit the greater good. As I said, “Let the mind be disciplined to understand and to endure its own lot, and let it have the knowledge that there is nothing which fortune does not dare” (2). We must strive to make decisions that reflect our values, not our passions.

Ultimately, preserving life should always be our priority, even if that means compromising the sovereignty of a nation. It is our duty to ensure that the lives of our citizens come first and that their safety is our primary concern.

My friend, thank you for your question. I understand how curious you may be about my penis. As a philosopher, I focus on the mental wellbeing of a person over the physical pleasures. I believe that pleasure is found in being free from mental disturbance (1). It is a crime to injure any man, as we are all fellow citizens in a larger state (2). To make sound decisions in life, it is important to have a firm and trustworthy mind, not one that is disturbed by lust, greed, envy, or ambition (3). Our soul has capabilities to reach its divine origin, so it is important to keep our vices in check to reach such heights (4). Men should seek pleasure from honorable sources, and not be overwhelmed by greed and forgetfulness of what is honorable (5).

Thank you for your question. I hope this answer has been helpful.

Very nice. Are you using NodeJS? Apparently the Python bindings do support streaming the responses, but not the Node ones (yet?). Was curious if anyone had found/built a workaround for that yet.

I really enjoy philosophy and think this is a cool project.

I do think there's two camps of views here. The first being that ideas of past philosophers can be relevant and useful in addressing contemporary issues.

But on the other hand, these ideas were developed at a certain point in time with the respective cultural context.

Stoicism tends to be a good choice and philosophers like Seneca were more practical in their philosophy than socratic. But ask it for straight-forward advice on a modern challenge and it will be more socratic.

If people start trusting these bots too much how would the following outcomes be avoided from causing people harm?

(1) Coaxed into giving personal information (2) Manipulated economically into buying stuff the other party is trying to dump (3) Manipulated politically to vote for whoever is backing up the project (4) Collect the "wisdom of crowds" and use it against them (5) Help marketers sell people more stuff they don't need'

"Whether to choose Emacs or Vim is a difficult decision, as it depends on the individual's preferences and needs. As Seneca said, “Will any one give this passion as an assistant and companion to virtue, although it disturbs calm reason, without which virtue can do nothing?” (1). It is important to remember that we should not let our passions dictate our decisions, and must use reason to guide us."

Site is down from HN hug of death. I don't really care, I'm upvoting despite not reading it just because of the title.

The domain MarcusAureli.us is available.. just saying.. ask.marcusaureli.us has a certain something..

I asked it "What is evil? Please write your reply in iambic pentameter."

Results are fairly decent, for example:

That which entices us to yield our freedom,

And to accept wrongs and ties of servitude,

Is the source of true and lasting harm, I deem,

For there can be no Good in servile mood.

Would love a breakdown on how this fine-tuning is accomplished. What was the format of the input data? How many prompt/response pairs was it fine-tuned on? Where/how did you extract the prompt/response pairs?

Great work btw!

If it's public, Can you share the repo? This is really good, and I'd love to see how you did it. I imagine you are using a vector store/search on the backend, just cutrious!

Results are truncated for some reason.

One of the results

> remember that such activities can lead to

This life advice is almost as poorly given as my dads

The stoics apparently don't understand the significance of the number 42. Their philosophy is dead to me.

Ah you beat me to it! I had thought about doing this but with all sorts of philosophers / materials.

Really nice!

Looks cool. What did you use to build the front end?

Why does it say that it has no answer to most of my questions?

"finally, it's important to"... boring void.

This is great chance for Dylan to learn about caching.

wow, this is cool, quotes are sourced! :)

Is this using few shot prompting?

> Can money buy happiness?

My friend, money can bring temporary joys, but true happiness must come from within. As I wrote in The Sum Total of Our Happiness(1), the true goods are those which reason bestows, and these are substantial and eternal. Money can buy us certain advantages(2), such as a physician's care or a teacher's education, but these do not guarantee true happiness.

In fact, money can be a source of unhappiness. Riches can lead to pride and unpopularity, and these can be damaging to our well-being(3). We should recognize that money can be a convenience(4), and we should be grateful for it, but it should not be our ultimate source of joy.

True happiness involves understanding ourselves, embracing our own moral values, and developing our inner strengths. Money can be a tool to help us achieve this, but it is not the ultimate goal.

(1) The sum total of our happiness must not be placed in the flesh; the true goods are those which reason bestows, substantial and eternal; they cannot fall away, neither can they grow less or be diminished. Other things are goods according to opinion, and though they are called by the same name as the true goods, the essence of goodness is not in them. Let us therefore call them "advantages," and, to use our technical term, "preferred" things. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...

(2) You buy of a physician life and good health, the value of which cannot be estimated in money; from a teacher of the liberal sciences you buy the education of a gentleman and mental culture; therefore you pay these persons the price, not of what they give us, but of their trouble in giving it; you pay them for devoting their attention to us, for disregarding their own affairs to attend to us: they receive the price, not of their services, but of the expenditure of their time. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Benefits/Book_VI#15

(3) It is this antecedent cause which inheres in riches; they puff up the spirit and beget pride, they bring on unpopularity and unsettle the mind to such an extent that the mere reputation of having wealth, though it is bound to harm us, nevertheless affords delight. All goods, however, ought properly to be free from blame; they are pure, they do not corrupt the spirit, and they do not tempt us. They do, indeed, uplift and broaden the spirit, but without puffing it up. Those things which are goods produce confidence, but riches produce shamelessness. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...

(4) Nor does this follow from our (Stoic) system alone the Peripatetics, also, who widely extend the boundaries of human happiness, declare that trifling benefits reach bad men, and that he who does not return them is ungrateful. We therefore do not agree that things which do not tend to improve the mind should be called benefits, yet do not deny that these things are convenient and desirable. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Benefits/Book_V#13