site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

From a neuroscientific perspective, we are almost certainly not LLMs or transformers. Despite lots of work AFAIK nobody’s shown how a backpropagation learning algorithm (which operates on global differentials and supervised labels) could be implemented by individual cells. Not to mention that we are bootstrapping LLMs with our own intelligence (via data) and it’s an open question what novel understanding it can generate.

LLMs are amazing but we’re building planes not birds.

In general, these kinds of conversations happen when we we make significant technological advancements. You used to have Tinbergen (?) and Skinner talking about how humans are just switchboards between sensory input and output responses. Then computer programs, and I think a few more paradigm shifts that I forget. A decade ago AlphaGo was the new hotness and we were inundated with papers saying humans were just Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning algorithms.

There are as yet not-fully-understood extreme inefficiencies in LLM training compared to the human brain, and the brain for all advanced animals certainly isn’t trained ‘from scratch’ the way a base model is. Even then, there have been experiments with ultra-low parameter counts that are pretty impressive at English at a young child’s level. There are theories for how a form of backpropagation might be approximated by the human brain. These are dismissed by neuroscientists, but this isn’t any different to Chomsky dismissing AI before it completely eviscerated the bulk of his life’s work and crowning academic achievement. In any case, when we say the brain is a language model we’re not claiming that there’s a perfect, 1:1 equivalent of every process undertaken when training and deploying a primitive modern model on transistor-based hardware in the brain, that’s far too literal. The claim is that intelligence is fundamentally next-token-prediction and that the secret to our intelligence is a combination of statistics 101 and very efficient biological compute.

I understood you to be making four separate claims, here and below:

  1. Humans are just LLMs on top of a multi-modal head.
  2. We have discovered how human intelligence works.
  3. We have discovered how human consciousness works.
  4. This proves that all human experience is the product of naturally-occurring accidents of genetics, with all the implicit consequences for philosophy, religion, etc.

If you'll forgive me, this seems to be shooting very far out into the Bailey and I would therefore like to narrow it down towards a defensible Motte.

Counter-claims:

  1. It is very unlikely that human brains operate on a deep-learning paradigm that resembles anything we use now. I'm the last guy to overstate our level of neuroscientific understanding (my disappointment with it is why I left the field) but we understand pretty well how individual neurons interact with each other on a physical basis: how they fire based on the signals they receive; how that firing affects the propensity of nearby neurons to fire; how relative firing time influences the strength of connections between neurons. It just doesn't look anything like a deep learning network for the reasons I gave above. Importantly, this isn't equivalent to Chomsky dismissing computational linguistics: Chomsky deliberately made his field entirely theoretical and explicitly dismissed any attempts to look at real languages or neural patterns, so when he was beaten on a theoretical level he got the boot. In comparison, the physical basics of neuroscience (and ONLY the physical basics) are pretty well nailed down by experimental electrode measurements. You mention the existing models of backpropagation in biological circuits but AFAIK they're very clunky, can't actually be used to learn anything useful, and don't drop nicely out of what we know about actual neurons. It's just neuroscientists trying not to be left behind by the new hotness. I'll take a look at a cite if you have one handy, though, it's been a while.
  2. Next-token prediction does impressively well at mimicking human intelligence, especially in abstract intellectual areas where the availalbe data covers the space well. I think we can agree on this. LLMs perform very well on code, writing (ish), mathematics (apparently), legal (passed the bar exam), etc.
  3. Next-token prediction does less well at the generation of new knowledge or new thought and cannot yet be said to have replicated human intelligence. In general, I found that GPT 4 failed to perform well when asked to use topics from field A to assist me in thinking about field B. On a lot of subjects AI reflexively defaults to rephrasing blog posts rather than making a deeper analysis, even when guided or prompted. I am also not aware of any work where an LLM makes itself significantly more intelligent by self-play (as AlphaZero did), so I don't think we can regard it as close to proved that statistics 101 + compute alone is the secret to human intelligence. It might be! But at the moment I don't think you can defend the claim that it is.

I think other people have covered qualia and philosophical questions already, so I won't go there if you don't mind.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats