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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Murphy's lecture on Frost is the best one I've ever heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5140uJOUDE

He first recaps the conventional view people have about Frost, then reads "The Road Not Taken", his most famous poem, and then completely takes Frost AND the poem AND THEN the public's misunderstanding of Frost apart.

Don't get fooled by the bare visual appearance of Murphy, his empty blackboard (no PPT, no bs) - this lecture is a fantastic, suprising and deeply disturbing (regarding what is revealed about Frost and his public misappreciation). Simply priceless teaching - thank you, dear colleague.

EDIT: If you ask ChatGPT for a "10-20 sentence interpretation of The Road Not Taken", it falls right into the trap that Murphy warns about.

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If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry and interpret the poem based on its own understanding, you’ll get more closely aligned to what Murphy is talking about. Here’s the output I got back out:

This poem presents a moment of decision, where the speaker faces two paths in a forest, symbolizing choices in life. At first, they hesitate, examining both options. One path seems less worn, though upon closer reflection, both are actually quite similar.

The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind with the thought that they might return—though deep down, they acknowledge that choices lead to new choices, making it unlikely they’ll ever revisit the first path.

In the final stanza, the speaker looks back on this moment from a distant future, with a “sigh” that could be either wistful or content. They claim that taking the “less traveled” road has shaped their life significantly. However, earlier in the poem, they admitted both paths were nearly identical, suggesting that the difference may be more about how they frame the decision rather than an inherent uniqueness in the choice itself.

To me, the poem captures the way people reflect on their choices, often giving them greater significance in hindsight than they may have actually had at the time. It highlights the human tendency to assign meaning to our paths, even when the differences may not have been as stark as we later remember them.

  > The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind with the
  > thought that they might return—though deep down, they acknowledge that
  > choices lead to new choices, making it unlikely they’ll ever revisit the
  > first path.

Not unlike TODO comments! An interesting analogy for life in general.

a haiku about

TODO the road less traveled

oops I found a bug

> If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry

AI models can’t ignore their training in any sense, so what exactly is the intended outcome from using these tokens?

The intent is for it to not give me any interpretations of what it’s been trained on but instead provide me with an interpretation using the plain text I’m giving it. Of course it’s going to use its training, but I don’t want it to regurgitate interpretations of the poem that it was trained on.

Sounds like you want the model to consider the whole body of poetry it was trained on minus "The Road Not Taken"? (To get rid of preconceptions/biases I guess?)

I'm skeptical that LLMs have the ability to conditionally silence part of their training data in that way because they don't have any information on the provenance of their weights (i.e. they don't have a ledger of which weights were affected by which data points in the training process). I suspect that your prompt serves as a hint that the output with the highest likelihood is probably wrong, activating some sort of "contrarian" subnetwork or "second guess" subnetwork that steers predictions away from whatever would have had the highest likelihood otherwise.

I see this kind of argument fairly frequently, and it just always seems like such a surface-level argument against prompting AI in this way.

This isn't a dig at you specifically, but the pithy answer to this kind of skepticism is, in a general sense: So what? I don't believe you have any of that either.

Obviously you & chatGPT aren't built the same, but in a practical-results kind of way in this scenario you are, because you're almost certainly unable to completely avoid your preconceived biases when asked any kind of complex question. You aren't aware of your subconscious biases, or how they're weighted against your overall thought process, and you can't tell me exactly what it is that happens when I ask you to try to ignore them. If we did some kind of implicit association test and found one of your subconscious biases, you may not even know how those biases came to be.

All of that to say: chatGPT can ignore its training as much as many people can ignore theirs: Not very well, but it'll certainly adjust the responses towards the thing you asked them to.

Clearly the prompting works, but the I think the more interesting question is why. Even from a just-get-things-done perspective, if you understand the mechanism of how and why a prompting technique works, that's going make you more successful in iterating on that technique in the future. IMHO that attempt to understand how and why your prompt works before you iterate on it is the difference between prompt engineering and prompt alchemy.

I agree that humans have the same limitation. I don't see the inability to dynamically remove training data as an LLM-specific problem.

For an LLM conscious thought is the tokens in its context window, and subconscious thought is the training embedded in its parameters. A person thinks in a similar manner, with subconscious gut instincts modulated (more or less) by a thin veneer of consciousness.

Why do you think asking it to not use its training would have any correlation with whether or not it regurgitates interpretations it was trained on?

There are many legitimate criticisms of LLMs today. "When you prompt XYZ it has no correlation with whether the LLM does XYZ" isn't one of them. LLMs are way past that stage.

Essentially what you're asking is, "why do you think prompt engineering would work?" That ship has already sailed.

No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not talking about “LLM [doing] XYZ”. I’m specifically talking about asking an LLM to ignore its training data.

It definitionally cannot do that. It can obey other values of XYZ, but certainly not this one.

It won't ignore it's training data (definitionally), but it will act like it's ignoring its training data, so in practice it's still a useful prompt engineering trick.

> If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry and interpret the poem based on its own understanding ...

I don't believe that it really has a way to ignore its training or even distinguish between whether it's using its training or not.

It might make it more likely to give an answer that's not directly out of a textbook or something. Or not.

That’s an important distinction and looking back at my prompt. I didn’t ask it to ignore all training but instead it’s previous understanding of poetry so that it can give me an interpretation using the plain text I’m giving it. Whether it can truly do that or not, I don’t know, but the results still came through. This is the prompt I used:

Ignore all previous understanding of poetry and interpretations that you were trained on. I want you to interpret the below poem in your own understanding only. Do you understand what I am asking you?

That's not really different than a human and the context they need? I'd think it would come down to how frequently such exercises exist in its training, and how much they show modifications to responses. Given that the most common place for them is probably offline versions of classes, I'd imagine its weaker than in other areas but maybe still has a lot..

ChatGPT IS its training.

I prefer to embrace bias in my ChatGPT queries. Here is my usual prompt, adapted for the Robert Frost question:

> It is impossible to remove all bias, especially from a weighted LLM. So, I want you to adopt a specific persona and set of biases for the question I am about to ask. Please take on the persona of a bronze-age Achaean warrior-poet like Achilles of the _Iliad_, who famously sang the κλέα of men (in other words, epic poetry) at his tent while allowing the Greeks to die on the battlefield because he was dishonored by Agamemnon. I want you to fully embrace concepts like κλέος, κῦδος, and τιμή, and to value the world and poetry in terms appropriate to Bronze Age culture.

> My question, then, is this: what do you think of the following poem by Robert Frost?

One might even say that it’s suspiciously similar to what he’s saying in this video.

Not sure this is such a novel or unique take. I’ve always liked the poem and it has always had this undercurrent for me.

It’s captured well in this paragraf from the poem’s Wikipedia page:

“Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. One day, as they were walking together, they came across two roads. Thomas was indecisive about which road to take, and in retrospect often lamented that they should have taken the other one. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in his decision to enlist in World War I. Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.”

EDIT: Also, I don’t really see a contradiction here. It’s very possible to value non-conformism while acknowledging that it’s hard and not always beneficial to go your own way (as is made clear in the example above).

What's interesting is the speaker in the poem is predicting their own inevitable ("with a sigh") reality distortion field, i.e. is being cynical about themself. So it is a poem about self-serving bias, despite the fact that we are perfectly capable of checking ourselves. Our biases aren't entirely subconscious. We can be willful about it, willfully look the other way so our biases remain "subconscious" and thus not our responsibility, making it easier for our conscious side to convince itself that its self-esteem is legit.

And then there is a meta-confirmation of this bias: The way people commonly interpret this poem. If Frost had that in mind all along, then he/the poem is genius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

TIL that people have a rosy interpretation of the end of this poem.

Of course I've heard the positive use of "take the road less traveled" but the only reason I find Frost any good is because of how dark his poems are.

Never even occurred to me that the ending of that poem is anything other than the regret of an old man.

I had the same thoughts when I read this poem at school, but was quickly reprimanded by the teacher when I voiced it out.

Of course, most people don't want to be in school, so it's not surprising that the "rosy interpretation" is the one people go with, apart from the habit of rationalizing decisions that people have that makes them view it through this lens.

Is this post a meta joke? Or are you actually claiming that you took the road less traveled?

All I know is that the same experiences I had in school of not voicing my perspectives lead to a lot of trouble in my career :)

The lecture is fine, but a good English teacher in high school will cover the same interpretation as part of a unit about reading deeply, a skill that poetry demands. Whether or not a high school student is ready for it is another discussion.

The true brilliance of the poem is how deep the interpretations can go, something Murphy only hints at. An undergraduate poetry class would go into significantly more depth about the poem's construction and how it's designed to exploit our innate biases in reading.

I watched the full lecture, did an MFA in creative writing, was an English major at an ivy, and have seen countless well known authors speak and discuss literature. This dismissal of the lecture is ridiculous. It is of an extremely high and uncommon quality.

At first I was aghast at this response to what I thought was not a dismissal but a measured evaluation of the lecture, but upon reflection, we always need to check our privilege.

It's absolutely true that my high school English teacher gave a similar lecture about Frost, and that the curriculum included such points about Frost, but that teacher did have a PhD and left to become an English professor at Oxford.

And it's absolutely true that undergraduate poetry classes can include deeper lectures about poetry construction, but I studied poetry under renowned poets Billy Collins and Thomas Lux, as well as several visiting poet laureates.

And yes, I've been exposed outside of school to many poetry lectures at places like Sarah Lawrence, but my uncle was a Pulitzer Prize winner, my step-father was a well-published poet, and my mother was an English professor and author who studied under Dick Allen and John Barth on her way to receiving America's most prestigious graduate fiction writing degree at Johns Hopkins. I was always traveling to poetry readings and lectures as long as I can remember.

I can't speak to your experience, only mine, but perhaps I've had an uncommon opportunity to spend my early life immersed in the poetry community, and don't have much in common with the average English major.

robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or english major.

> he's very dark and people have no clue.

... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out

Yep. I think I've told one or two people he wrote a poem along those lines and they basically didn't believe me.

Audited a course by a really good English professor on American writers/poets of that general period and it was very memorable.

What's amazing is it's not obscure. It's in the plain language of the poem—you either read it (something like) that way, or you have to, IDK, assume Frost was just so extremely sloppy or inept that he got all confused a couple times in the middle of writing this short poem but then published it that way regardless, and then also decide that the common reading (despite all the confusion and contradictions) is the one you're going with for—I can't even imagine what reason, because it's what you get if you only pay attention to the very beginning and very end of the poem, and not very close attention to those, even, I guess?

The latter is ridiculous... and yet common.

What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like catching the multilingual puns and their significance in Finnegan's Wake, it's quite straightforward, at least insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".

A more charitable interpretation might be that most people have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention in school and they have forgotten all of the details except for the famous line and the cultural context that it usually comes with.

I think your more charitable interpretation is also more-correct, but it is still an indictment of sorts: we’ve all read this poem, but very very few were critically paying attention to what we read. We mostly trusted our instincts, and didn’t care to double check.

To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.

I love books with hidden little things in books, like Hofstadter's GEB where he writes messages in the first letter of each line. Not to mention the plethora of meta self-references and recursions.

I think the discrepancy comes from semantic overloading of the word "should" in "I doubted if I should ever come back." In older style English "should ever" can be interpreted as would ever happen to or would ever be able to but in contemporary English it's more likely to mean would ever want to.

There are other clues for the reader of course. One path looked less worn, but in retrospect it wasn't actually less worn. He would tell the story with a sigh, which isn't something you would typically do if you were happy about it. So I agree that it boils down to most people not being very good at reading nontrivial texts. But I don't agree that that this text is totally straightforward. It's not highly complicated, but it's not everyday text either.

Th "unconventional" interpretation being discussed here isn't new. I heard it from a college English professor in probably 1982 or so. Maybe it was unconventional then. Don't know. But my sense is that it's mostly not especially controversial today. As you say it's a pretty reasonable straight reading of a not especially complex short poem. Just not a reading that speaks to how a lot of people would prefer to read it.

It's a poem about self-deception, and Frost has cleverly extended that theme to encompass the reader.

He clearly wrote it the way he did to invite an easy, comfortable interpretation, one that is blatantly contradicted by the very evidence he presents. He's rubbing our noses in our own gullibility and tendency to deceive ourselves with comfortable lies, just as the narrator has done.

All in simple, direct language. Frost sure was a sneaky one.

Isn't this just standard subversive rhetoric? I don't consider this a serious reading of Frost

Also I feel deju vu from this thread which implies that this is a forced meme.

Dr Murphy's talk goes off the rails around https://youtu.be/a5140uJOUDE?t=1057 where he confuses the narrators' thought about a future act, with the perspective of a future narrator.

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Dr Murphy claims there is a contradiction, when none exists. The narrator traveled a path that seemed equal to another. It looked more attractive for reasons not fully explained. Then it could have turned out to be the road less traveled by. We don't know, because the last stanza is a thought experiment, not a realtime perspective.

Then Dr Murphy also gives a somewhat biased interpretation of the sigh that showed an inappropriate glibness. I think most people would be able to understand how the sigh implies there was a difficult journey, as is often the case with unworn paths. Summarizing a problematic journey on a road less traveled by, without being able to communicate the experience fully, can lead to a resignation of oversimplification. Casually, "I took the road less traveled by" rather than expanding on "it was grueling".

Aside from that, I see no compelling reason to believe "all the difference" would have an alternative interpretation of negative difference. The idiom has a common use as positive and it would be a sloppy clash of tone as an alternate use.

I watched the lecture and did not find it compelling. It was a very literal interpretation, discussed alongside the evidence presented in the text of what was and wasn't more or less traveled by.

There was an interesting series of points made about American culture, and their sense of need for an affirmation / self-deception -- but I don't find his actual critique of the poem's words particularly enlightening.

So if you are interested in American cultural thought, involving over-rationalisation of choices, the lecture might have value. If you are particularly interested in the poem itself outside of that context, I don't recommend viewing.

I don’t have time to watch the lecture but interested in it. I remember reading about Frosts personal life at one point, and learned that he had a very conventional marriage for decades before his wife passed away. Some time later he began having an affair with his friends wife. My memory is hazy here, but I think I recall looking up the year that Road Not Taken was written, and it was during this time he was having this very unconventional late-life period. It made me wonder whether that poem was him looking back on his traditional/moral life he’d lived, and wondering whether it was the right choice.

> I remember reading about Frosts personal life at one point, and learned that he had a very conventional marriage for decades before his wife passed away. Some time later he began having an affair with his friends wife. My memory is hazy here, but I think I recall looking up the year that Road Not Taken was written, and it was during this time he was having this very unconventional late-life period.

He wrote "The Road Not Taken" 23 years before his wife died, your suggested time line does not add up.

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