staticman2

It's not even just an atheist issue. You have to have spiritual beliefs that value the specific repetitive church rituals so as not to be bored out of your mind.

Unless you grew up surrounded by nonbelievers I'm guessing half a year ago wasn't the first time you've ever been to a church and there's a little more to this anecdote.

I don't understand how this claim can even be tested:

> In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI.

Once you are "going beyond the literal text" the standard is usefulness of your insight about the novel, not whether your insight is "right" or "wrong".

Don't you need to do reinforcement learning through human feedback to get non gibberish results from the models in general?

1900 era humans are not available to do this so I'm not sure how this experiment is supposed to work.

>about how LLMs are just statistical machines and not really thinking,

I don't think the article said anything about statistics?

This seems to be a sort of Rorchasch test but looking at it again:

>This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people

It really does seem to me the article is making fun of people who think this sort of article is on point.

There's a genre of satire where the joke is that it makes you ask "Who the heck is the sort of person who would write this?"

It could fit in that genre but of course I could be wrong.

You ask why this would be satire?

Well let's take a look at this:

>The best thing about a good deep conversation is when the other person gets you: you explain a complicated situation you find yourself in, and find some resonance in their replies.

>That, at least, is what happens when chatting with the recent large models.

The first sentence says a good conversation is between two people. The author then pulls the rug out and says "Psych. A good conversation is when I use LLMs."

The author points out humans have decades of memories but is surprised that when they tell someone they are wrong they don't immediately agree and sycophantically mirror the author's point of view.

The author thinks it's weird they don't know when the next eclipse is. They should know this info intuitively.

The author claims humans have a habit of being wrong even in issues of religion but models have no such flaw. If only humans embraced evidence based religious opinions like LLMs.

The author wonders why they bothered writing this article instead of asking ChatGPT to write it.

Did you ask an LLM if this is satire?

I did and Opus said it wasn't satire.

This was clearly a hallucination so I informed it it was incorrect and it changed it's opinion to agree with me so clearly I known what I'm talking about.

I'll spare you the entire output but among other things after I corrected it it said:

The "repeating the same mistakes" section is even better once you see it. The complaint is essentially: "I told someone they were wrong, and they didn't immediately capitulate. Surely pointing out their error should rewire their brain instantly?" The author presents this as a human deficiency rather than recognizing that disagreement isn't a bug.

I think you may mean Sperber and Mercier define "reasoning" as the capacity to produce and evaluate arguments?

I found a pirate copy of Netflix at 1080p looked a lot better than Netflix at 1080p, presumably because the pirate copy was a remix of the 4K copy and Netflix serves a low bitrate 1080p version.

When you switch the topic to some analogy about a spot in meat space by some lake it derails the conversation as to whether your analogy is on point rather than the conversation topic.

>I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm

I'm reading this comment as if you had written:

"The TV show Hogan's Heroes makes being a prisoner of war sound like a jolly good time."

Why is that cool?

Imagine you are a billionaire so money is no object and really interested in the Dhali Llama?

Would you read the book then hire someone to pretend to be the author and ask questions that are not covered by the book? Then be enraptured by whatever the roleplayer invents?

Probably not? At least this isn't a phenomenon I've heard of?

It's okay that we disagree.

However I don't believe I misunderstand your point. The dialogue is almost certainly scripted, presumably by an advertisement professional. You believe you know why the advertisement person wrote it that way. You think the man was scripted to be "polite" to the woman he was watching in the context of the scene and that particular line. You think your understanding of the society of the time explains the line.

I offered an alternative interpretation. The advertisement professional wanted to begin with something winkingly sexy so had a bunch of guys say a woman was attractive.

I don't even know what to make of the statement that "for politeness is not a thing easily turned on and off." A stock character in an IBM ad doesn't have an internal life so does not struggle to be polite or impolite.

This whole framing would make more sense to me if we were talking about a male game show host (a real living breathing person) trying to be polite to a real life female contestant in an old game show.

Yes I read your post where you claimed "Back in the day, women expected such complements"

Either you meant women expected such compliments broadly (as in a game show) or you meant women expected such compliments if featured in the intro of an IBM OCR documentary where a man shows confusion about a woman on screen.

The latter interpretation is ridiculous, yet here we are.

The woman isn't in the room with the men so you are saying he's being polite to film footage. This is an unintuitive argument.

If you want to test your theory bring up a game show from that era and see if the male host says "You are attractive" to every young female contestant.

If you don't think that's the same thing the dialogue is too idiosyncratic to be explainable in reference to normal social mores.

In the context of the film this has has little to do with politeness. The executive goes on to says of the film "It has to "STIMULATE these men who know far more about the HARD facts of their business".

I think it's intentionally being a bit naughty.

I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.

I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.

Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.

The survey being used was created by a Princeton University psychology professor. It may or may not be useful but there's nothing obviously pseudo-scientific about it. I do not think the linked article writer is making that claim.

I'm sorry but I don't see what "knowledge cutoff" has to do with what we were talking about- which is using a LLM find PDFs and other sources for research.

I'm surprised to hear anyone finds these models trustworthy for research.

Just today I asked Claude what year over year inflation was and it gave me 2023 to 2024.

I also thought some sites ban A.I. crawling so if they have the best source on a topic, you won't get it.

Are you uploading PDFs that already have a text layer?

I don't currently subscribe to Gemini but on A.I. Studio's free offering when I upload a non OCR PDF of around 20 pages the software environment's OCR feeds it to the model with greater accuracy than I've seen from any other source.

Your Peanuts reference made me smile but I don't see why you thought a little girl's comment in a 1960s Christmas special was supposed to represent the "adult take" on mental health in the 1960s.

Lucy isn't actually a psychologist which is part of the reason the "gag" is funny.

For context Wikipedia says the guy you linked to is a far right white supremacist who founded a pseudoscience journal.

Starting a blog post with a lengthy science fiction novel excerpt without setup is annoying.

Well it's obviously hyperbole because "all human thought" is not in a model's training data nor available in a model's output.

If your gushing fits a 0.5b it probably doesn't tell us much about A.I. capabilities.

>A queryable semantic network of all human thought

This hyperbole would describe any LLM of any size and quality, including a 0.5b model.

Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.

It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.

It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.

Whenever someone paraphrases a folksy aphorism about airplanes and birds or fish and submarines I suppose I'm meant to rebut with folksy aphorisms like:

"A.I. and humans are as different as chalk and cheese."

As aphorisms are a good way to think about this topic?

Turing seems to be saying several things. He writes:

>If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.

This anticipates the very modern social media discussion where someone has nothing substantive to say on the topic but delights in showing off their preferred definition of a word.

For example someone shows up in a discussion of LLMs to say:

"Humans and machines both use tokens".

This would be true as long as you choose a sufficiently broad definition of "token" but tells us nothing substantive about either Humans or LLMs.

The diagnostic criteria for "Aspergers" never required above average, or even average intelligence.

If you had visited the Aspergers and autism website support forum "wrong planet" 20 years ago you'd have seen many lower functioning than you people with "aspergers" complaining about aspects of their lives.

So I don't see how "aspergers" is a superpower.

The diagnostic criteria isn't based on whether the condition is treatable.

For example, nobody who is diagnosed with autism is proclaimed "not autistic" if they find therapy to be unhelpful.