> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
726 karma · joined October 12, 2019
I don't know whether that's why anybody downvoted you, but I think that's probably part of the reason. On the other hand, the Hacker News guidelines ask us to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment or post. In that spirit, just as you could have said something to the effect of "Yep, AI researchers learned from behavioral economics and research into human decision making and here's where OpenAI mentions it," I could have said just "the relevance may not be that it's a new idea but rather that it's a neat idea, to the person posting it at least. Maybe someone who knows AI systems more deeply wouldn't find it interesting. I do though!" That's a bit of hypocrisy on my part, I think.
Anyhow, for the record, yep, I knew of adaptive reasoning, but, no, I didn't know that it matched what this paper proposes so closely. Thanks for the correction!
* The person who posted it likely posted it not as an out-of-date paper but as an interesting idea. Your comment ignores the idea and focuses on what you're calling its out-of-dateness.
* You say "this has been solved" without defining what "this" is.
* Your description of the solution -- different effort levels -- seems to indicate that you misunderstand the idea that the paper is proposing. If I understand their proposal, it's that the system itself decides how to reason based on the nature of the problem it faces, given the model's world model and past experience. "Effort" isn't so much the issue as types of effort using different systems, modeled specifically after Kahneman's idea of fast and slow thinking.
* The title is an allusion to a book by Daniel Kahneman. The brisk dismissal without acknowledging the idea or the history doesn't leave a good impression, even if I'm mistaken and you're right.
In short, Hacker News readers tend to reward depth and detail (the FAQ specifically encourages thoughtful contributions and explicitly discourages dismissal). Your comment doesn't provide them, and it appears to make a mistake that further undermines its value as a contribution to discussion.
I'm never sure what on earth this kind of impressionistic math is supposed to tell me. Is the comparison between 4.6 and 1.0? 3.6 and 1.0? Clearly the comparison isn't supposed to be 1.0 and -2.6, even though that's what the words literally mean. I can't be the only person who finds this infuriating and distracting. These numbers shouldn't be impressionistic. They should be precise. That this is an article on spectrum.ieee.org makes the imprecision all the stranger. I'd expect their readershipt to care, for instance, about what's even being measured. Is this the geometric mean of something? The arithmetic mean? And what latency has improved?
For anybody else who found this confusing: "relative strength index," not "repetitive stress injury."
But I'll be honest: between the uncited numbers, the clear-eyed, neutral potted history, the italics, and the all-caps "LEGAL," I'm starting to think it would be foolish not to take your argument seriously.
Right, but LLMs use one word where they need ten; by your own admission you do the opposite. I don't think you owe anybody an apology.
Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but this isn't at all what I remember. I frankly can't think of a single movie or TV show that paints parenting as bad, let alone the worst thing in the world. I can think of only one celebrity who I can recall extolled his child-free life. That was within the past year-- and I think the guy is a total dipshit man-child.
And I have no idea where you grew up, or whether that's actually a factor, but my teachers, when they had kids, seemed like loving parents. When they didn't have kids, I don't think they ever spoke badly or parenting.
Is that right? Think of code that draws a square, the representation of that code in storage, the movement of electrons, and the 'actual' square on the screen -- these are all to us transcriptions of same thing across different domains or media, and we can deterministically translate back and forth between them, but there's no real, actual, essential identity property. The code isn't the square. The electricity isn't the code. The storage isn't the electricity.
I think of LLM reasoning and output similarly. The underlying graph of weights, matrices, and other data aren't knowledge, understanding, or language. 'Translating' the system's output to language is jusas valid and correct as translating it into some visual representation that would be incoherent to us, like a sequence of flashing lights or imperceptible noise patterns projected over an image of a dog.
I guess this is all a very long winded way of restating Chinese-room problem: we feed the man in the room a message; he returns one that, for all the world, is indistinguishable from a "real" response that you and I might send, but, like you said, he has no access to sense data. He also has no access to the biology underlying real mental processes. He also doesn't have any personhood that we can discern. He has, rather, gradually developed through reinforcement the tendency to provide responses approximating all of all of that.
I'm not sure the epistemological question "does he understand" (which is what the Chinese-room problem asks) has any meaningful answer. There's no mind, so there's no understanding. What there is, rather, is a system that generate patterns that we map to language and that our brains therefore map to communication, personhood, meaning, etc. It's the square I mentioned earlier. It's to us a convincing simulacrum, and it may be faithful enough to us to stand in those things, but that's not what it is.
My sense is that LLMs are (a) the big-data Pyramids of Giza and (b) a consequence of hardware and software developing ways of generating abstractions that capture and generate more complex patterns than were previously possible to capture or generate in a manner comprehensible to humans. Everything humans do follows some kind of pattern. Language is the perfect way for a machine to capture that, because is simpler than the world itself and has clear rules and patterns, encoded in representations computers already have, that, modeled well enough, can generate output indistinguishable from the real thing -- what you or I might do with it.
But the pattern matching that it does, and that we translate into language, is much more numerically rigorous and complex than anything you or I consciously do with words (hell, most people can't even figure out when to use "lie" vs "lay") and not doing what you or I do with it. It's not language. It's the square on the screen.
> That's exactly what I was saying. Rendering a few widgets shouldn't pin your CPU or GPU because it's so little work.
Your comment doesn't say this at all:
> > This is the kind of thing usually a human notices and says 'dont do that, that is kind of crazy'.
> It's not crazy. That is literally what 99.99% of video games do. They repaint everything constantly, only limited by either your vsync rate or hardware.
Am I missing something? Are you referring to some other part of the thread?
If you nevertheless are certain that that was or is the goal of one of the US's two major political parties, then you've reached a perplexing conclusion based on, I can only guess, no evidence, evidence imagined, evidence misunderstood, or evidence contained in a source that should be tossed into the garbage can.
This critique had its heyday in the 2000 election. I can't fathom still holding fast to it. The last 26 years have been a continuing, relentless stream of evidence to the contrary.
It's really unfortunate that people who are likeliest to make terrible choices are probably also likely to make the choice to have kids. A lot of people who choose not to have kids generally know themselves well enough to make the right choice, which also means that they'd probably be better parents than a lot of the clueless people who wind up with kids they never should have had.
Still, my wife and I both feel that parenting is the best thing we've ever done or will ever do. It's everything I hoped it would be -- and much more besides. The benefits are innumerable for us.