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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

> Can you give an example of an incomprehensible piece of writing (any writing, never mind a proof) that has commercial value commensurate with the costs involved here?

It depends on what exactly you mean by "commercial value commensurate with the costs involved" but I'd volunteer the 3G/4G/5G specifications and the other documentation required to implement the mobile network protocols. 5G is currently sitting at over 50,000 pages and it's one of the reasons Qualcomm/Broadcom/Apple are the only ones who can realistically make a mobile radio.

I don't think there is a single human to whom more than a few thousand pages would be comprehensible at a time except for the occasional genius.

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Read the rest of the discussion. The claim is about text which is in principle incomprehensible to humans.

If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text. That dissemination of knowledge is what provides the value, not the mere existence of the text. If that person forgets or dies before they can share their knowledge then it will be lost.

We have many examples of this from history: ancient texts written in a lost language. These texts provide us with no value until the day they can be deciphered, unless you count linguistic puzzle-solving as a virtue.

> If there exists a text which only one person can understand, that person can communicate their understanding to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text.

If there exists a text which only an AI can understand, that AI can communicate their key conclusions to others, even if that doesn't help them with the original text.

The only difference here is the amount of meat involved. Perhaps tossing a few steaks on the server racks could help with that.

If an AI can communicate its findings to us in a way that we can understand it, then its findings are by definition intelligible to humans. Your claim was about texts for which this is not possible.

So, you're willing to claim that a conclusion that you don't understand the reasoning for is equivalent to comprehension?

Because, again, I can point to hundreds of examples of texts where nobody but the author understands it, and they're only giving summarized "commandments" that you should follow if you want good results.

If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler?

If I told you "don't use spin locks, call futex instead", do you think have gained an understanding of the Linux scheduler?

Yes, because I already knew what schedulers are, what spinlocks are, and if I want to know what futex is I can go look it up. Comprehension is within my grasp.

Your original claim, which you’ve repeatedly distanced yourself from (by trying to use comprehensible examples) but won’t admit to, was about incomprehensible stuff. That is, text that no human could possibly understand, ever.

You’re repeatedly engaging in intellectual dishonesty rather than simply admit that “human comprehension probably will continue for the foreseeable future”, which is really not a controversial idea at all.

Bullshit. Human comprehension will not continue, it will reduced to "when the AI tells us to add Bismuth, strontium, and copper together in this way, we get a superconductor", but that doesn't mean we understand high temperature superconductivity.

For what it's worth, we've known about BSCCO for nearly 40 years, and we still don't have a great physical understanding of how it works, thought we made decent progress in 2022.

That’s still comprehensible. Incomprehensible chemistry instructions simply could not be followed by any human. They would be of no use to anyone.

You're using a very bad definition of incomprehensible. We don't understand the chemistry behind how these things work, it's that simple. If you're going to argue it's comprehensible, you'd better show how it works and go collect your Nobel prize.

All we know is that if we melt the right rocks together, we get a superconductor that works in some mysterious way that we can't explain. We know it's not Cooper pairs.

No, I’m using the right one [1]. You are the one using a bizarre definition for your own purposes.

I can see there is no further productive discussion to be had with you at all. I bid you good day.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incomprehensible

Since it's comprehensible, please point me to someone that can comprehend high temperature superconductivity and how it works, and then explain why they didn't explain it.

With the definition you seem to want to use, it's impossible for anything to be incomprehensible, and therefore it's tautological that there's no incomprehensible LLM output: nothing at all is incomprehensible.

Do you have an example of anything incomprehensible? Anything at all? Even the things that Gödel would say are inaccessible could, in theory, become accessible: we just don't know with absolute certainly that the mathematics it was based on got all the axioms right, though we see no errors now.

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