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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I thought that what we were interested in was 1 - we want to know the real process so that we can shape or modify it to suit our needs. So I'm confused as to why, it seems to me, some commentators behave as if the thought box tells us anything relevant.

I think all 3 are interesting in different ways, but in any case, I don't perceive commenters as exploring 1. Do you have any examples?

If we were talking about humans, for instance, we might say, "Joe used XYZ Pokemon against ABC Pokemon because he noticed that ABC has weakness to water, and XYZ has a water attack." This might also be what consciously went through Joe's mind before he pressed the buttons to make that happen. All that would be constrained entirely to 2. In order to get to 1, we'd need to discuss the physics of the neurons inside Joe's brain and how they were stimulated by the signals from his retina that were stimulated by the photons coming out of the computer screen which come from the pixels that represent Pokemons XYZ and ABC, etc. For an LLM, the analog would be... something to do with the weights in the model and the algorithms used to predict the next word based on the previous words (I don't know enough about how the models work beneath the hood to get deeper than that).

In both humans and LLMs, 1 would be more precise and accurate in a real sense, and 2 would be mostly ad hoc justifications. But 2 would still be interesting and also useful for predicting behavior.