weekend-editor.bsky.social
Retired physicist, after a career in machine learning & stats mostly for cancer drug discovery. Also @[email protected].
Now blogging about stats in the news: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/
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"...you can't see much of what we do and know"
Nor, for the most part, would we *want* to see much of it.
But I'm glad *somebody* takes care of it, so I don't have to.
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Reminder they said this exact bull shit back then
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If we understand how they work, then it would be miraculous for them to know anything much at all, beyond the structure of texts and images.
But then, I'm a cranky old knowledge representation and expert systems guy, so I would say that, wouldn't I? :-)
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TIL a new word, "racecraft".
Thank you for that. It looks very useful.
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That was part of my blog post from last week:
www.someweekendreading.blog/llm-ai-still...
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How about: a skilled and convincing liar certainly sounds like he's telling the truth, but there's a big difference between that and *actually* telling the truth.
Fact-checking reveals the difference.
With LLMs, every single time I've dived into what they said, it was wrong at the detail level.
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Sort of like "correct" versus "seems correct"?
LLMs are trained to sound like a plausible continuation of a conversation. So their output is, on the surface, quite convincing. They generate code that sometimes does not have *obvious* bugs.
But "seems correct" and "correct" are not the same.
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This is an interesting point: they are *less* trying to execute policy, and *more* trying to manipulate politics.
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Is this op-ed somewhere that everyone, like national reporters, can read it?
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I did some studies on a bunch of social & economic outcomes, including the deficit (below).
Logistic regression on the party control of the presidency, house, and senate revealed that Republican presidents are bad news. Other branches not significant.
www.someweekendreading.blog/parties-defi...
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Maybe try the Fakespeare method, where you parody Shakespeare?
The hallucination, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we think they make sense.
-- parody of a Cassius line in _Julius Caesar_, Act I, scene ii.
shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesa....
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Time to resurrect the Billion Prices Project, which was an independent check on federal statistics for, e.g., the CPI.
Of course it wouldn't get federal funding now, so we'd have to look elsewhere.
thebillionpricesproject.com
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This way the emperor who has no clothes can wear his birthday suit to the parade.
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The hallucination is in us, that we imagine their outputs make sense.
This is what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category error".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
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I'm slightly surprised he could pronounce a multi-syllable word like "coronavirus".
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Time to revive something like the Billion Prices Project from back in 2008. It exonerated government inflation data then, but it would be good to have a watchdog now.
If only we could find non-government funding for it!
thebillionpricesproject.com
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That's an interesting way to learn to read.
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@scalzi.com might have a theory about burritos with some application to your situation here.
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"L'enfer, c'est les autres." (Hell is other people.) -- Jean-Paul Sartre, _Huis Clos_
Applies especially to breakout groups and collaborative workshops forcibly imposed by managerial fiat.
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I wrote a blog post about a number of problematic examples of LLM AI.
One that I had not expected was the creeping right-wing bias in the training material, for reasons ranging from font quality to paper quality and scan quality:
www.someweekendreading.blog/llm-ai-still...
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I usually go with "Track down the evil nitwit who tied people to the track in the first place, and turn him over to angry cops with nightsticks."
Treat the problem, not the symptom.
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Well... sure, you said it.
But we were *all* thinking it.
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He was fond of apologetics. :-)
The main merit of the novel for me is it is (a) hilarious and (b) right on the nose for modern times.
For example:
Anarchists -> Terrorists
Poetry battle -> Rap battle
The idea that the villains have a restaurant, and it's a really *good* one, is just delicious!
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Bring back Cahokia!
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Chesterton's _The Man Who Was Thursday_ is just brilliant.
(Though critics may be forgiven for opining that the apologetics in the conclusion resemble being slapped in the face with a wet fish.)