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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how ChatGPT really does give you the most balanced, middle of the road answers. It feels like a distillation of all human knowledge and sentiments. I use it constantly to get advice on plans, architectures, thoughts, etc.. to get an idea of pretty much what the average person would think. It often points out things I've overlooked which I'll improve my design with and go back and forth with ChatGPT until we're both in agreement.

I even read a classic book the other day and had a great discussion with ChatGPT about moral relativism, the different schools of thought and how it fit into philosophy as a whole. For students this technology is incredible, I wish I had it for all my classes.

Even sometimes comments I'll make on here or Reddit I'll pass through ChatGPT first to see if I made any mistakes in my logic.

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Would put slight caution around asking it anything more than "what should I read next about this?"

For whatever reason*, it is particularly bad at discussing philosophy I find. When I was grading philosophy 101, I would have probably given it a passing grade against the overall curve, but that's about it. Philosophy is a discipline of careful, sometimes jargoney, and always very couched assertions that can be easily misunderstood and appropriated. This is probably its greatest weakness, and in many ways this weakness is the progenitor of philosophy itself in the Western world, with Plato at the start (i.e. with the figure of the sophist, the paradox of a false wisdom).

- Maybe one reason: there is a huge amount of, lets say, "armchair philosophy" on the internet, compared to other disciplines. Many blogposts and tiny manifestos of people really excited by some out of context quote from Spinoza or whatever. And you start to really feel this part of the dataset when you ask about philosophy. Many strange takes and misunderstandings.

I asked it where moral relativism fit in with philosophy and it came back with this

    Philosophy
        Ethics/Moral Philosophy
            Meta-Ethics: The study of moral thought, language, and properties
                Moral Realism: Belief that there are objective moral facts
                Moral Anti-Realism: Denial of the existence of objective moral facts
                    Moral Relativism: The belief that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint

I thought that was pretty good, what do you think?

Haha I think it's fine. I think its kinda cheeky answering you so literally, giving it an actual place to fit into :).

I don't doubt it can do, like, Wikipedia type classification ok, but that's not like really getting to the substance of anything! And, either way, its not like there is one decided-upon hierarchy of concepts like this people consciously work within. This is a fine picture to some, but others might contest, perhaps, that Meta-Ethics is the "study of moral thought, language, and properties." What is "moral language" anyway? Why is it meta relative to Moral Philosophy writ-large? Or perhaps one might argue that we need to think of meta-ethics as a sibling rather than child. The whole discipline is a mess of different thoughts and possible rebuttals and grand intellectual overturnings that will not be captured here. Maybe just try pasting that back into the prompt and asking "what's wrong with this picture?".

But like I said, its fine in that its fairly comparable to Wikipedia for utility, (with IMO a worse interface, but I get why people like it more).

Yea I don’t think it was trained on any hierarchy in particular, ChatGPT literally came up with this on the fly. There’s even more to it I didn’t include to keep the post small. Just really impressive to have a conversation with it that goes all sorts of places. I don’t know any philosophy professors so this is the next best thing.

The reason you feel that way might be that you are familiar enough with philosophy.

After all, LLMs and ChatGPT in particular are are indistinguishable from productised Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Edit: rewrote to be more neutral, sorry

> to get an idea of pretty much what the average person would think

There is no such thing as an average person.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

Funnily enough I think you both might be right here, there isn't such a thing as an average person, but ChatGPT may be the synthesis of the average opinion.

what is an average opinion? it is the sum of opinions which disagree with the result

Maybe "balanced" rather than "average" is a better way of putting it?

What’s the balance between, say, opinions that trans people should be exterminated vs not? What’s the balance between Ukraine sovereignty vs Russian occupation? Etc

My general experience (not that topic) is that for anything even slightly approaching the sides of the Silicon Valley Overton Window, ChatGPT creates micro-essay saying "On the one hand, $foo, on the other hand, $bar. It's important to remember that $topic is controversial, and that many people disagree."

It would involve serious consideration of the opinions you don't agree with, rather than just qualifying them in the most hyperbolic and dismissive way possible. Hopefully ai is better capable of this sort of reasoning than people are.

It gives you the average opinion of someone on the Internet, particularly places like Reddit, which is FAR from the “average opinion” of most people. This has been a problem for a while, people keep assuming the Internet represents some kind of moral or ethical consensus on so many issues when it’s not even close.

On the other hand, since AIs are taught using user content from Reddit, once other cultures start using these AIs, they will begin to conform more towards those norms (or will actively go against it and The Great Sort will continue forward).

The other way to phrase this is high-dimensional spheres are "spikey".

> what the average person would think

Keep in mind that due to the nature of the data and the RLHF training, it's more like a weighted average, something like

    0.5*(average American view) + 0.4*(average WEIRD view) + 0.1*(average human view).

(where WEIRD = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, standard terminology in psychological research.)

This may or may not matter depending on the questions you're asking, just something to keep in mind.

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