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Comment by 4ggr0 | Hacker News Reader

That's just like, your opinion, man.

There are podcasts for almost every topic where experts are present. Journalists, Scientists, Activists, Researchers etc. can be heard in podcasts, I don't really see why it's generally a mistake to listen to a podcast to learn important information.

During the pandemic my partner was attending university from home and listening to their professors via MS Teams, these classes were also recorded so that they could listen to them at a later point. In some ways that's just a professional podcast.

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I think you know that isn’t a podcast in the sense that we’re discussing.

And depending on the class and the institution, I may still trust ChatGPT more than what gets taught.

Of course the part about university classes is different, but you seem to ignore everything else I've said.

There are tons of podcasts involving experts talking about their field of expertise, how can it be a mistake to listen to such podcasts to gather information?

It’s a mistake because what drives podcasts are their popularity, not their accuracy.

There is no “sort by accuracy” button in any podcasting app, nor are they peer reviewed.

Furthermore, podcasts are not a review of the body of knowledge on a subject; they’re often a complete layperson interviewing a single member of a given field, at best. Almost never do the views of any individual actually represent any field as a whole.

So once we’ve thrown out the concept of accuracy and completeness, ChatGPT fares exceedingly well in comparison. You’d do much worse than ChatGPT for idle conversation level accuracy.

What you just wrote makes more sense applied to LLM output than podcasts! You'd just as easily argue that "radio" or "news" is all bad if you don't want to differentiate between different forms of expression and communication within a medium. (Which, obviously, would be silly)

Sorry what? Nothing I wrote apples to LLMs; they are not optimized for popularity, they’ve been meticulously designed and built to be as accurate as possible.

They absolutely have not been meticulously designed to be as factually accurate as possible.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning

Yes, they have.

That link doesn't say anything about the fundamental design goals of the network architecture or training process. It doesn't even mention factual correctness, except in the sense that it may broadly fall under "producing a desired output".

No they're not. If they were, they would default to 0 temperature and have no Top P, frequency/presence penalty, and frankly not have knowledge as a function of language to begin with. They're designed to be convincing as a "presence" and output reasonable sounding language in context, with accuracy as an afterthought.

>Almost never do the views of any individual actually represent any field as a whole.

Setting aside the many individuals who currently lead their fields, history is filled with groundbreaking heretics.

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/mavericks-...

History is filled with many more plain ol’ heretics however, and we’re exceptionally bad at telling the difference in the meantime.

You, most importantly, are complete garbage at telling the difference between a crackpot and an innovator in a field you know nothing about.

Trying to drink unpasteurized knowledge will infect you a lot more quickly than it will enlighten you.

I'd say that I regret engaging with you, but that last line is golden.

It's not censorship, propaganda and official disinformation, it's "Pasteurized Knowledge®"

But that's the problem; you falsely believe you're capable of differentiating between propaganda and quality. You're not, on topics of which you are not an expert.

That's what flat-eartherism is, that's what jewish space lasers are. The argument you're giving is a tacit endorsement of that kind of "inquiry", which for reasonable people is unconscionable.

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