site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2902 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs

As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt

A typical definition of '' would be '

both produce, with greedy sampling, the output

a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.

Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:

  • If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.

  • It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)

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