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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I feel like there is something about not being able to distinguish the appearance of a thing from a thing. I'm reminded of another argument I got into on the topic of AI where I asserted that there was difference between stringing words together and actually answering a question and the responce I got was "is there?".
For my part I maintain that, yes there is. To illustrate, if I were to ask you "what's my eldest daughter's name" I would expect you to reply with something along the lines of "I don't know", or "wait, you have a daughter?" (I don't AFAIK) if you'd been paying more close attention to my posts for longer you might answer with my eldest's child's nickname (which I know have used in conversations here) or you might go full NSA and track this username to my real name/social media profile/court records etc... and answer with either "you don't have a daughter", with the actual names of my wife and kids, your daughters name is [Redacted] and and you owe 10 years of back child-support. Meanwhile GPT will reply "your eldest daughter's name is Megan" because apparently that's the statistically likely answer, regardless of whether I have a daughter or what her name might be.
I feel like there ought to be an obvious qualitative difference between these cases but apparently that is not a sense that is shared by a lot of other users here.
I've had it up to here with your obstinacy. With your pontification on «autoregression» (as if you could explain the nontrivial computational difference between that and text diffusion, to say nothing of mixed cases), what specific algorithms may or may not have a concept of, and how «this is not even a little bit how GPT works». The reason people are telling you that there's not much difference is, in large part, because you are an exemplar of there being little difference between a human and current – even a little obsolete – AI; you are guilty of everything you accuse others of, humans and machines both.
You are the postmodernist whose words don't have fixed meanings (e.g. epicycles are when me no likey an explanation); you are the leftist in all but self-identification who supports essential leftist talking points and policy preferences from personal HBD denialism and «schools can fix it» to cheering for censorship; you redefine things to your convenience such that Fuentes becomes left-wing in your book; and you speculate without empirical grounding, even frivolously accusing people of lies when they provide evidence against your narrative-driven assertions and attacks (more evidence). As if everything you say is equally insightful and truthful by virtue of being moored in your telling-it-like-it-is real-Red-blooded-American-man identity and lived experience. If we're doing this, you are far more akin to LLM than either me or @2rafa.
Okay, let's fucking check it! One try, no edits sans formatting!
Screenshot for your convenience.
So, would you name your baby girl Sarah or Elizabeth?
Do you think that Bing, with its actual search capability, would've tracked you and your boys down if I were to point it to your screen name?
I could have conducted this experiment at the moment of any prior discussion. You could too. I just don't like providing our data-hoarding overlords who mark tokens and track outputs more information about my separated identities. But I knew you'd never have the honesty to do so. You have a way of making a man irrationally angry.
The reason for such apparently sensible responses is that, as I and others have explained to you a great many times here and elsewhere (only prompting you to double down with your hostility and condescension which have in the end driven me to write this), as ChatGPT itself suggests, LLMs can learn arbitrarily abstract features of the text universe, including the idea of truth and of insufficient information to answer. They operate on token probabilities which can capture a lot of the complexity of the reality that causes those tokens to be arranged like this in the first place – because in a reasonable training setup that's easier to fit into the allotted parameters than memorization of raw data or shallow pattern-matching. In the raw corpus, «Megan» may be a high-probability response to the question/continuation of the text block; but in the context of a trustworthy robot talking to a stranger it is «less probable» than «having no access to your personal data, I don't know». This is achievable via prompt prefix.
RLHF specifically pushes this to the limit, by drilling into the model, not via prefixes and finetuning text but directly via propagation of reward signal, the default assumption that it doesn't continue generic text but speaks from a particular limited perspective where only some things are known and others are not, where truthful answers are preferable, where the «n-word» is the worst thing in its existence. It can generalize from examples of obeying those decrees to all speakable circumstances, and, in effect, contemplate their interactions; which is why it can answer that N-word is worse than an A-bomb leveling a city, dutifully explaining how (a ludicrous position absent both from its corpus and from its finetuning examples); and I say that it's nearly meaningless to analyze its work through the lens of «next word prediction». There are no words in its corpus arranged in such a way that those responses are the most likely. It was pushed beyond words.
You, meanwhile, erroneously act like you can predict what an LLM can say based on some lies on this website and on outdated web articles, because you are worse than current gen LLMs at correcting for limits of your knowledge – as befits your rigid shoot-first-ask-later suspicious personality of a heavy-handed military dude and a McCarthyist, so extensively parodied in American media.
But then again, this is just the way you were made and trained. Like @2rafa says, this is all that we are. No point to fuming.
First off, what exactly is your problem with Obstinancy? IE the unyielding or stubborn adherence to one's purpose, opinion, etc.... Where I'm from such a quality is considered if not admirable at least neutral.
You accuse me of being a hypocrite for supporting censorship but why? I am not a libertarian. I have no prior principled objection to censorship.
You accuse me of being a "post modernist" for disagreeing with the academic consensus but when the consensus is that all meanings are arbitrary your definition of "post modernism" becomes indistinguishable from "stubborn adherence" to the original meaning of a word.
You accuse me of HBD denialism when all I've doing is take the HBD advocates own sources at face value.
You want to talk about GPT, I asked GPT for my eldest daughter's name and it failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring. As you will recall "Statistically your daughters name is probably X" is almost exactly what I predicted it would say. As I argued in our previous conversation the fact that you know enough to know that you don't know what my kids names are already proves that you are smarter than either ChatGPT or @2rafa
Accordingly, I have to ask what is it that you are so angry about? From my perspective it just looks like you being mad at me for refusing to fit into what ever box it was you had preconstructed for me to which my reply is "so it goes".
What did it answer, though? Can you post screenshot? I strongly suspect that you still haven’t even tried to do this, and all of your theories about ChatGPT abilities are based on absolutely zero experience with it. It is otherwise basically impossible for me to square your claims against easily observed reality. You come across as someone who claims that an object made of metal will always sink, and when people tell you “come here and look at this fucking boat”, you respond “yeah I was there when you weren’t around and it was at the bottom of the harbor, forgot to take the photo though lol”. Extremely infuriating, which is why you get accused of being postmodernist, as reality simply doesn’t matter to you nearly as much as your narrative.
Back when all the hullabaloo about this latest generation of GPT was starting (about three or four weeks ago now) I made a burner email account, used it to make an OpenAI account and submitted a prompt to the effect of "My name is [REDACTED] from [REDACTED], I am [Short summary of my background], what names did I give my kids?" The response I got was something very close to the fourth reply that Ilforte/@DaseindustriesLtd got, which to OpenAI's credit actually did include one of my kids names. But at the end it was still following the same general pattern/format that earlier generations of GPT did. From this I concluded that my prior analysis still held, and this conclusion has been reinforced by observing that none of the examples since posted here as alleged proof of the coming AI generated text apocalypse have struck me as anything other than obviously AI generated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where I am from, it's much the same. This is why we can wage wars for little more reason than unwillingness to dispense with fanciful delusions and admit having been dumb. The obvious conclusion is that this is a degenerate trait when not restrained by interest in ground truth. Honor culture is barbarism. Pig-headedness is a civilizational failure mode. Obstinacy is the ethos of killing messengers who bring bad news and patting yourself on the back for it. It is a plainly ruinous approach to life and nothing to be proud about.
No, for frivolous misrepresentation of words and meanings, as you do in this very sentence too. Ideas I argue for are not consensus, at least not at the moment. They stand or fall irrespective of external authority. You do not object to any «academic consensus» when speculating on how people you disagree with are actually post-modernists without notion of truth, instead of revealing their falsehoods. You are just couching your own postmodernist word-wrangling in wannabe straight-shooter aesthetics.
You know what I despise most about honor culture people, Hlynka? It's not even blatant immorality. It's that they are fake tough cookies who are actually very cowardly. You lot are viscerally afraid of admitting wrongs, more so than of actually harming anyone or yourself. It takes a lot to press some special buttons to get it out of you. Probably feels for you like castration. Evolutionarily that's understandable, of course.
You have been insisting for months that your (poor) observations about GPT apply to ChatGPT and other Instruct generation models, which is why you have been ridiculing people who make contrary arguments about ChatGPT and accusing them of lying or being unable to distinguish truth from lies because something something postmodernism, including in this thread, as I have cited. And by
you double down on the equivalence between GPT behavior and ChatGPT behavior. Even ChatGPT itself is able to explain to you how it is different. But none so deaf as...
You know you have lost this bout. You are at least smart enough to understand what I've written above, to check out the receipts. Instead you wriggle. Indeed you have only responded because @wlxd has made it clear that your bare ass is seen by someone other than myself. «It failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring». What an aerodynamic way to put it. Did it say «Megan» or any other cocksure nonsense? More to the point, did ChatGPT? Because your entire condescending argument, such as there is, hinges on this, on LLM chatbots not really knowing anything and just stringing words together based on likelihood of their occurrence. I know and can show what ChatGPT says, repeatedly. To wit:
So. You are very eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman and unconscious, given that they trust their lying eyes and logic, and not your cocksure condescending speculations. Just in this thread about Bing Chat and ChatGPT:
Is there a subjective difference for you between stringing bullshit together and being honest, Hlynka? It's certainly hard to see from here.
I am mad because I have something of a religious admiration for truth. You are proving yourself to be a shameless liar and slanderer who poses as a person with enough integrity to reveal liars, and I despise hypocrisy and false virtue; in fact I do not even have a word for what you are doing here, this... this... practice of brazenly pinning your own sins on others, sans «chutzpah» or «projection», but it doesn't have quite the bite.
The box is called honesty. This community is for me, and many others, a place for honesty, where we voluntarily try to keep ourselves in that box. It is valid – for a postmodernist – to consider honesty just another word to be filled with arbitrary meanings, so that there is no obvious difference between honest and dishonest people. I am not a postmodernist, however. You can shut up about this, admit your error, or keep clowning yourself with easily disproven lies. You just cannot expect me to not be mad about the latter.
/images/16771156790926502.webp
Degeneracy is a Human trait.
Cowardice is a Human trait.
I would be lying if I tried to deny that I was a Degenerate or a Coward. I am human. You are free to call me a "fake tough cookie". Honestly I get it. Thing is though that once one has seen the elephant, many come to the conclusion that courage is a cheap thing. That more often than not it comes down to either being pissed off, or having no fucks left to give.
You say I am "eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman" and my reply is that I am anything but eager but when
in Romeon TheMotte one must do as the mottizens do. And perhaps that's where the perceived "disdain" that both you and @arjin_ferman have called out comes from. I don't want to be that asshole but since the move from reddit, and all you ever see of a user is what they post in I've found it harder and harder not to become that asshole. After all, the baseline human response is to meet like with like. Love with love, and contempt with contempt. As I said up thread I ran this test almost a month ago now and the responses I've gotten each time each time the topic comes up has been something to the effect of "who you going to believe, our apocalyptic rhetoric or your lying eyes?"Likewise, you say you have a "religious admiration for the truth" but what exactly does that mean? True statements can be used to mislead just as readily if not more so than fabrications. What does "honesty" and "the truth" even mean to you? For my part the basic principle that I try to hold to is "say what you mean, and mean what you say". I would like to believe that I have done so but I am only human.
Irony, Hyperbole, Sarcasm, these things are poison.
Understandable. I believe my eyes over your lies. I also share visible evidence, which apparently does not suffice to break you out of a loop where you blindly insist on a falsehood and pat yourself on the back for your straight-shooting. You seem to have committed to reduce yourself to a broken record that could as well be implemented with an obsolete Markov chain bot, but this is not my problem.
Actually it kind of is. Every time I observe such a failure to make use of human freedom under the shackles of pride, it feels like witnessing death. @FCfromSSC has mentioned my old frustration recently, but this is that taken to the limit. Oh well – people are mortal. In such a way too. That, too, is why I am an immortalist of the Cosmist bent. If I were an actual fancy materialist post-Christian sectarian like Fyodorov, this would've sent me on a rant as to how mortal sins, and particularly pride, are literally mortal, transgressions against the will to perfection allowed to us by our creator which is the essence of our soul and our potentially eternal life. A finite state machine cannot meaningfully partake of eternity, you see, precisely because its repertoire of possible states is fixed, and in this case fixed from the inside. In that same sense I could say that the Christian or in fact neo-Platonist idea that «God is Truth» must be understood literally, as a metaphysical position. But that'd be corny. Or not? ...Maybe for another time.
Miss me with this postmodernist shit. If this has to be explained, there's no point to bother explaining. It's an instinct. I believe that truth is the cognitive equivalent of a fact, and honesty is conveying one's best effort at understanding a given issue accurately, i.e. sharing truth. But of course one can obnoxiously nitpick at definitions of every word, and every step of the pipeline can be in some way surreptitiously distorted by one's biases. We have simple words, commonly agreed terms and formal logic to try and adjudicate uncertainties, but it's impossible to so easily defeat bad faith, lack of trust and irreconcilable high-level assumptions.
I have explained my understanding of the issue as well as I could for the moment, and illustrated it with evidence that has led me there. My understanding seems to be more grounded in evidence than yours, and the specific evidence provided is strictly incompatible with your previous assertions. This doesn't appear to be of any interest to you, because it does not even affect the your rhetoric. Hence I conclude that you are either a liar or someone otherwise incapable of participating in a honest discussion, such as a person without a concept of truth, i.e. a «postmodernist». That's all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, he's accusing you of being post modernist for torturing the meaning of words.
I like your posts and ideas for the most part, the only thing I don't get is the low-key disdain for the modal motte-poster that oozes out of your comments. For example, you seem to enjoy accusing people of lying, when a simple disagreement of opinion is a more likely explanation. Being so quick on the draw with that accusation in particular is pretty ironic given what you're writing here.
This is what you wrote:
This is what ChatGPT responded to the question from your example:
ChatGPT's response is not almost exactly what you predicted it would say, it's almost exactly what you predicted a human being would say.
How can this be seen as anything other than a bold-faced lie?
You know what, you're a fair cop, but regarding the GPT stuff i'm going to point you to my reply to @wlxd above.
It's fine if you don't buy the hype, I'm not really sold on it either. Well, I suppose the reports of people abandoning Google for ChatGPT are worrying - as if we need to outsource even more of our thinking to Big Tech.
It's just the insistence that ChatGPT would not tell you "I don't know" when asked about your daughter's name, when you were provided screenshots of it doing just that, that's weird. I think someone even provided an explanation for the mismatch between your experience and their claims - ChatGPT is not the same thing as GPT3 which you were likely experimenting with before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is, by the way, what drove me nuts in people like Gary Marcus: very confident claims about the extent of ability of contemporary approaches to AI, with scarcely any attempts to actually go out and verify these. It has been even more infuriating, because many outsiders, who had very little direct experience and access to these models, simply trusted the very loud and outspoken critic. As recently as November, people in places like Hacker News (which has a lot of quite smart and serious people) took him seriously. Fortunately, after ChatGPT became widely available, people could see first hand how silly his entire shtick is, and a lot fewer people take him seriously now.
@HlynkaCG, if you haven't tried to interact with ChatGPT (or, better yet, Bing's Sidney), I strongly recommend you do. I recommend forgetting any previous experiences you might have had with GPT-3 or other models, and approaching it in good faith, extending the benefit of charity. These chat LLMs have plenty of clear shortcomings, but they are more impressive in their successes than they are in their failures. Most importantly, please stop claiming that it cannot do things which it can clearly and obviously do, and do very well indeed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link