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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Yeah, this follows along my own increasingly cynical thoughts.

Bing chat, "Sydney", GPT3, people assure us they aren't as smart as we think they are. They aren't actually thinking. They are just mimicking the things people say, trained on a massive dataset of things people have said.

Since 2016 I'm unconvinced people aren't just doing the same thing a majority of the time. I mean there was always an element of "haha, look at the sheeple" before that. But whatever blind herd mentality was an aspect of human nature before seems jacked up to 11 since "Orange Man Bad". It became this massive cultural cudgel nearly all organs of narrative began blindly adhering to. The herd reaction to Covid didn't help much either. The routine discussions I have with people nightmarishly misinformed by MSNBC and CNN, falling back on the same old tired rhetoric about how only evil Fox News viewers could possibly disagree with them and their received opinions.

It's not that my estimation of GPT3 has improved. It's that my estimation of humans has fallen. I now believe there is a much thinner line between whatever is behind the emulated mouth sounds GPT3 makes, and the natural mouth sounds humans make. Maybe it's all more fake than we'd like to believe.

It's that my estimation of humans has fallen

Or maybe we always have been like that. But now that we can observe the whole 8 billions on the scale in real time, and developed hacks to produce necessary results on scale that is noticeable, we are starting to realize that. Also maybe not only GPTs but average humans too now have access to vast volumes of pre-digested knowledge, so we use our own facilities less.

This is exactly how I feel. If GPT3 can make a convincing simulation of a Reddit NPC, or a college student who didn't do the work and is bluffing, maybe there's a lot less mystery cognition going on in those people also.

a convincing simulation of a Reddit NPC

How low is the bar for a “Reddit NPC”? Reddit is a big place, so it’s hard to know what this means without looking at specific subreddits.

Plus, you can't forget the theory/accusation that Reddit is actually literally astroturfed with less-sophisticated bots pushing an agenda.

My belief is that people essentially auto-pilot as chat bots a lot of the time and very little sentient thought is happening, even if they are capable of it.

The issue is that for a lot of people the goal of conversation is either the game of conversation itself or "winning", neither of which is really connected to direct interaction with their sentient mind.

People also shield themselves behind the chatbot because they are afraid of revealing themselves. Better use the chatbot to pretend you have a clue than reveal that you're at best a midwit bore with little to no notable thoughts and opinions. People also do this to protect their self-image from reality.

I also suspect that people have trouble running their chatbot and thinking at the same time so they let the chatbot (mostly) run the show and they can think and evaluate things afterwards as needed.

All this doesn't mean that people aren't sentient, it's just that they don't much use their sentience, especially when they're talking.

What is “sentient thought” in this case? Like… thinking the words out loud step by step? That’s useful and really powerful but smart people also have valuable flashes of insight where they skip from a to d bypassing b and c entirely.

Is someone faking their way through a last minute work meeting while they think about what they want to eat for dinner doing sentient thought? Someone daydreaming about the new girl at work while they drive on autopilot?

The thing that makes decisions and has meta-cognitive thoughts. The agent.

Things can be more or less automated. You body will continue taking breaths without you thinking about but you can decide when and how to take them as well.

It's the same thing with language.

Much of the time of the day sentience is a fairly passive observer and can even an active hinderence for performing well so it does well to stay out of the way.

Is someone faking their way through a last minute work meeting while they think about what they want to eat for dinner doing sentient thought?

They might be having sentient thoughts about dinner.

Someone daydreaming about the new girl at work while they drive on autopilot?

Probably not.

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