in response to Bender pointing out that ChatGPT and its competitors simply encode relationships between words and have no concept of referent or meaning, which is a devastating critique of what the technology actually does, the absolute best response he can muster for his work is “yeah, but humans don’t do anything more complicated than that”. I mean, speak for yourself Sam: the rest of us have some concept of semiotics, and we can do things like identify anagrams or count the number of letters in a word, which requires a level of recursivity that’s beyond what ChatGPT can muster.
Boom Shanka (emphasis added)
‘i am a stochastic parrot and so are u’
reminds me of
“In his desperation to have produced reality through computation, he denigrates actual reality by equating it to computation”
(from this review/analysis of the devs series). A pattern annoying common among the LLM AI fans.
E: Wow, I did not like the reactionary great man theory spin this article took there. Don’t think replacing the Altmans with Yarvins would be a big solution there. (At least that is how the NRx people would read this article). Quite a lot of the ‘we need more well read renaissance men’ people turned into hardcore trump supporters (and racists, and sexists and…). (Note this edit is after I already got 45 upvotes).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who picked up on that turn. The implication that what we need is an actual Bismark instead of a wannabe like we keep getting makes sense (I too would prefer if the levers of power were wielded by someone halfway competent who listens to and cares about people around them) but there are also some pretty strong reasons why we went from Bismark and Lincoln to Merkel and Trump, and also some pretty strong reasons why the road there led through Hitler and Wilson.
Along with my comments elsewhere about how the dunce believes their area of hypothetical expertise to be some kind of arcane gift revealed to the worthy, I feel like I should clarify that not only do the current top of dolts not have it but that there is no secret wisdom beyond the ken of normal men. That is a lie told by the powerful to stop you fro tom questioning their position; it’s the “because I’m your Dad and I said so” for adults. Learning things is hard and hard means expensive, so people with wealth and power have more opportunities to study things, but that lack of opportunity is not the same as lacking the ability to understand things and to contribute to a truly democratic process.
First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don’t personally understand or agree with. If they don’t know something, then that thing clearly isn’t worth knowing.
There is a corollary to this that I’ve seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can’t immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don’t is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.
See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they’re clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted I honestly was wondering why they were obsessing over IQ so much, but this comment actually made it all click
someone sent out the batpromptfondler signal and the mods are in shooting gallery mode
please refrain from commenting unaccordingly
MRW 38 of the 39 comments have almost nothing to do with the article