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Comment by cscheid | Hacker News Reader

(Disclosure: I’m a former academic with more than a handful of papers to my name)

The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper, and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves no favors by being unnecessarily kind to bad work. It’s important to keep perspective.

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I realized that I do have institutional access and so I was able to read the paper, and I stand by my initial criticism of the above comment.

"It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'."

The paper uses this number and acknowledges that it is not the only possible measure, and explains why they use this number and how it was derived. It is just the start of the paper, not "all this paper does." The paper primarily focuses on counterarguments to this number to then address the primary question of the relationship between the inner and outer brain.

A few questions it poses: does the superior colliculus contribute to a bottom-up "saliency map" to ultimately direct the attentional bottleneck in cognition? Why does the brain use the same neural circuitry for both rapid/parallel sensory processing and slow/serial cognition? This is not even how other parts of the body work (e.g., type I and II muscle fibers). Perhaps the associated routing machinery between input and output accounts for the billions of neurons? Maybe, like the visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex has a fine-grained organization of thousands of small modules each dedicated to a specific microtask?

We do ourselves the most favors by reading research with some skepticism, and asking questions. We do ourselves no favors by writing comments after only reading an abstract (please, tell me if I'm wrong). I only point out that discounting research so blithely does nothing for improving research. This was a perspective paper - an author asking questions to better understand a possible issue and guide research. And maybe the commenter is right, maybe this is the wrong focus, but I do not believe it was truly considered.

The question reduces to "how does the intrinsic capacities of intelligence, had by humans, give rise to the capacity to answer complex questions?" -- I see nothing which the framing in informational terms adds.

It's nothing more than saying: we know that wires have electrons, and are made of metal, and can support a transfer rate of 1Gbp/s -- and we know that an LLM takes 1 min to answer "Yes" to a postgraduate physics question -- so how/why does the current in the wire at 10^9 bit/s second, support this 1bit/min mechanism?

It's extremely wrong-headed. So much so the paper even makes the absurd claim that Musk's neurallink need not have any high bandwith capabilities because a "telephone" (to quote) would be sufficient.

This is like saying an internet-connected server, hosting an LLM, need not have a high bandwidth RAM, because it only needs to transmit 1bit/s to answer the "yes" question.

In my view there isn't much worthwhile to say under this framing of the problem -- it's a pseudoscientific framing --- as is quite a lot of 'research' that employs 'information' in this way, a red flag for the production of pseudoscience by computer scientists.

Their implied premise is: "computer science is the be-all and end-all of analysis, and of what one needs to know, and so reality must be as we conceive it". Thus they employ an abuse of abstraction to "prove" this fact: reduce everything down to its most abstract level, so that one speaks in "bits" and then equivocate in semantically-weighty ways between these "bits", and pretend not to be doing so. This ends with pythagorean levels of mysticism.

I appreciate that you are elaborating further on your issues with the paper. I, again, am not choosing to defend the paper itself, rather the reason for science - asking questions and finding answers, even ones that may not be "worthwhile." Because we do not always know what is worthwhile and often we ignore some important facts when we think, intuitively, something makes sense and there is no reason to study it.

But, I will counter your comparison regarding LLMs and the transfer rate of wires. We, humans, have wired up the LLM ourselves. Evolution wired our body/brain and we do not know all of the filters and connections that exist in the transfer and processing of data. There is so much about the body we do not know. With LLMs, we've created every part so it doesn't really compare.

And to say that fields of science should not consider the knowledge gleaned from other fields is preposterous. I read about a new discovery in Math almost every few months in which a person from a different field brought in different techniques and looked at a problem from a new angle. Maybe this framing of the problem is silly in the end, or maybe it is just what someone needs to read somewhere to spark an idea. It doesn't hurt to think about it.

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