There are limits to such algorithms, as proven by Kurt Godel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
482 karma · joined March 19, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
A lot of what you're talking about is the ability to detect Truth, or even truth!
0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.
Just a small, quick, bit of review. Does this thing make logical sense? Does it smell of any logical fallacies? What are the priors, or assumptions, that the argument is making?
I am not a fan of Scott Alexander, but he does at least give a fair amount of thought to his arguments and conclusions. However that doesn't mean much if the premise is flawed or his priors are miss calibrated. This goes for anyone. Just because the person you're looking up to has well reasoned arguments doesn't mean they're correct.
Aquinas started from the position that god exists and went from there. And while his arguments are really well reasoned and logical, they only make sense if you accept his priors.
Any given argument makes sense if your priors start in the right place for them. Euclidian Geometry works great, but if you throw out/modify the parallel postulate you can get wildly different answers for what makes sense. You can craft crazy mathematical worlds if you tweak ZFC, throw away the axiom of choice and some different stuff starts to happen.
Anyways, I hope you stop glazing scott, take everything you read with a grain of salt, and think for yourself.
Too many times I've used LLMs for tasks at work and some of the answers I've gotten back are subtlety wrong. I can skip past those suggestions because the subject is one I'm strong/experienced in and I can easily tell that the LLM is just wrong or speaking nonsense.
But if I didn't have that level of experience, I don't think I would be able to tell where the LLM was wrong/mistaken.
I think LLMs are great for learning new things, but I also think you have to be skeptical of everything it says and need to double check the logic of what it's telling you.
As an example, I listened to a, now defunct, podcast about Type Theory. Wild esoteric stuff.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this post Jon Haidt has been railing about social media for a while now, and has written several books on the subject.
Everything old is new again.
I'll confess the paper is a bit over my head. Astrophysics was never my passion and I became a software engineer right out of college anyways, so I'm a little rusty. However, in the 2005 paper they state that the BAO, specifically the way that the BAO has propagated, can't be explained by baryonic matter alone, which in their words would show a much larger effect than observed. This seems to be yet another observation that is consistent with dark matter.
However, since you must be a working astrophysicist, could you enlighten me with what you think is wrong with the interpretation of those observations? Do you think the >3 sigma confidence isn't enough for astrophysics?
I am genuinely curious.
They could be two different reasons.
I do prefer Occom's razor for these things. We've seen a bunch extremely large celestial objects move in ways that our models cannot account for with the things that we can see. Sure, there could be more than one thing out there causing all of those extremely similar effects. But that's far less likely than there just being one reason.
(I do agree with Angela Collier, youtuber nee physicst, Dark Matter is not a theory, it's an observation. We've looked out into the universe and have seen something that we call Dark Matter that our current theories don't match up with.)
GP, in their parenthesis, made the insinuation that if it, which I would take as a LLM, talks like a human and makes up answers, like a LLM is wont to do, like a human is it human? >(if it talks like a human and makes up answers like a human, is it a human? ;)
While I don't subscribe to the idea that humans have a soul, or some other dualist take, I do think that there is far more to a human than just our cognitive properties. So to convince me that something is human takes more than just listing to it talk to me or make things up during the discussion.
So, too, with a duck. Sure, if all I have to go on is hearing a quack then I would say yeah that's most probably a duck.
Just like if you told me a barn was red when we say just one side, I'd say it's probably red.
I know, I know, I am fun at parties.
Is there truly so little that makes up the soul of a duck? No mention of laying eggs? Caring for it's young? Viciously chasing children across the lawn of the local park? (I know that's usually the prevue of Geese, however I have seen ducks launch the occasional offensive against too curious little ones)
What are the use cases where the expected performance is high?
I'm also inspired to use capsaicin to fight my personal fight with some squirrels that feel the _need_ to live in my garage. They ignore all my humane traps and are chill with all the light and sound disruptions I put in there.
I can't wait to find out when the Butlerian Jihad starts.
No, I am afraid that I was being more of a follower of Wallace here, I was being sincere with my words. I truly do marvel that humans really haven't changed that much at all.
Humans really haven't changed that much at all.
> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Not to say that it should be completely discounted, only that it should be treated as evidence with a less than perfectly reliable. Not quite "hard" evidence, but definitely something that should be considered.
I served on a jury nearly 20 years ago for a criminal case. And the biggest thing at the time, if you recall that long ago, was the biggest shows in TV were CSI and Law & Order. I certainly watched them a fair amount.
Both, and the myriad of spin off and other shows in the same vein, presented a flashy and scientifically certain view of law enforcement.
I bring up my time on that jury because the lawyers both spent a _huge_ amount of time preempting everyone's questions about why there wasn't any conclusive "scientific" evidence. No finger prints, no weapons marks, no expert testimony, etc.
It turns out real life is far more messy than a 30-60 minute tv drama.
So as CSI, et. al. gave us these unrealistic fever dreams about how crime is solved in the real world, so too do "True Crime" stories give us an unrealistic view of what happens out there in the real world.
Anything that's even remotely domain specific becomes a garbled mess. Even watching documentaries about light engineering/archeology/history subjects are hilariously bad. Names of historical places and people are randomly correct and almost always never consistent.
The second anyone has a bit of an accent then it's completely useless.
I keep them on partially because I'm of the "everything needs to have subtitles else I can't hear the words they're saying" cohort. So I can figure out what they really mean, but if you couldn't hear anything I can see it being hugely distracting/distressing/confusing/frustrating.