Most people can’t lie that smoothly, and most readers don’t check carefully, unless they are already an expert in the area.
Any kind of maths proof is particularly bad, they will look convincing and clear until you read them very carefully and see all the holes.
...and he's built his whole career in sales because of it.
He despises the existence of Google, because the last thing a pathological bullshitter wants is fact-checking in pockets!
It's taken me nearly 40 years to understand that anchoring statements in reality is just a completely meaningless endeavor for him. He does not care what is true. He cares only what is convincing.
I've been wondering for about a year now why I feel like I can tell LLM work from human work so much more easily than most people, when the only "tell" I can put my finger on is, "The hair stands up on the back of my neck," but this explains ALL of it.
I've spent much of my life learning to tell when people are making things up, but telling when they genuinely believe something that's completely wrong is a very different skill.
It's especially frustrating when they change the narrative of a real story about something where there were multiple witnesses (e.g., my mom and my siblings), then come to believe the narrative, and then accuse us of conspiring to gaslight them.
On the one hand, I get why that would be disorienting and scary, to have a whole group of people telling you you're wrong about something you're sure you remember. On the other hand...karma?
What is the point of that? They're incomprehensible. (For those who haven't watched it: the video just shows people talking very fast, it doesn't explain why, kind of implies it's somehow good or impressive.)
Again/stepping back: what is the point of winning a debate tournament like this, or that values this 'debate'?
Generally yes, although a good team will slow down and speak more or less like normal people if they have a so-called "lay judge" who wouldn't be able to understand them going at full speed.
> but seriously value it in scoring?
You don't really get "scored" on how fast you speak (there's no points system), but, as I mentioned, there are strategic reasons to speak quickly.
For instance, a time-honored strategy is to spew out a huge number of roughly-orthogonal arguments (e.g. "my opponent's policy failed to support the resolution we are debating this tournament, and thus shouldn't win for procedural reasons." "my opponent's policy would destabilize the Kashmir conflict and thus lead to global thermonuclear war." "my opponent's policy would preclude this alternative policy I am now presenting, and my policy is better, ergo my opponent's policy is bad in terms of opportunity cost." and so on), and then circle back later in the debate and further develop any arguments your opponent failed to adequately address (perhaps because they can't speak as fast as you).
An interesting counter-example from when I was actively debating is that at least one team on the national circuit was arguing (somewhat successfully, if I remember right) that speaking fast was a reason to actively vote against a team. The rough gist of the argument was something along the lines that being trained to speak quickly (and have the huge amount of prep-work required to really get value out of the skill) was something really only accessible to affluent/"privileged" kids (although that latter term was a couple years away from entering the common lexicon, I think), and then connecting it back to the central topic of that debate season so as to undermine whatever position the other team had originally presented (but, of course, pointing out that the impact of their argument was occurring in the real world, right now, contra the assumed fiction of their opponent's policy proposal or whatever, and thus a more urgent reason to vote for them).
> what is the point of winning a debate tournament like this, or that values this 'debate'?
For the most part, it's a fun and challenging game for the people involved, the same reason people play chess or go bowling. There's a lot of work and creativity that goes into preparing for a tournament, and the debate rounds themselves reward being able to think quickly on your feet and work well with your debate partner. You get a lot of practice at speaking in public, to a hostile audience no less, which is imo an incredibly valuable life skill (and can be very exciting).
This is such an example of getting what you incentivize, not what matters.
I mean there is probably not a specific rule I could point to that a high school athlete couldn't ride a bike or a motorcycle in a 400m track run either.
There is probably not a specific rule that you can't shoot the shot put out of a canon either.
I would just assume the judges have the slightest bit of common sense.
There most definitely is such a rule, and there most definitely are people who have tried to do that - and been the cause of the original rule wording ; and others who still have tried to do so by "creatively interpreting" said rule.
Have you met humans?
He makes an intriguing point.
When Busta makes more intelligible listening than the arguments of your debate team, you know debate is broken.
[0]: Start 2 minutes in, give it a try: https://youtu.be/W7FfCJb8JZQ?feature=shared&t=120
Brevity is really important in a debate. Especially in the modern day where someone might turn you into a chad vs soyjack meme.
And if anything, what happens before the debate is more important than what happens during it. Our dear president showed us you can become the leader of the free world using playground insults and ad-libbed speeches if you choose the right demographics and look good in a suit.
Yup to your last sentence. It irritated me how off-topic his responses were.
Are there no rules in debates? There should be. You’re not allowed to punch someone in basketball so why should you be allowed to DOS people with bullshit in a debate?
They’ve been quietly open sourcing all of their arguments for like 20+ years.
This dataset is so large and good entirely because of speed reading and the current state of debate tournament competitive dynamics. Spreading might be objectively absurd to listeners but the effects of it are literally good for society.
That’s a queue, not a stack. The LLM response was correct.
The structure of the LLM answer is:
A is B; B exhibits property C.
The correct answer is:
A exhibits property C; B is the class of things with property C; therefore A is B.
There is a crucial difference between these two.
From https://ai.meta.com/research/cicero/ :
When playing 40 games against human players, CICERO achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game
There are not a lot of facts to know when playing diplomacy. It's all about manipulating the other guy with words.EDIT: LLMs also aren't egocentric; they'll respond in the other person's style (grammar, tone, and perhaps maintain their "subtext" like assumptions), and they're less likely to omit important information that would be implicit to them but not the other person.