is a convergent evolution of a belief a sign of shallowness? It could just as rightly be an example of consilience, which means its a very high value perspective, as it's a convergence of perspectives from differing origins and methods (in terms of training)
> when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.
Yes, it's a bit of a stretch to say LLMs are from independent origins, but just as much of a stretch to say any humans minds are (we have intensely shared linear compared to anything else)
As my (much older) brother retorted when I was a teen and said "great minds think alike", "ah, but fools seldom disagree".
Regardless of the details, all these models are the published collection of humanity's output reflected in a mirror that is warped by the choices made in the companies' reinforcement learning rewards, so one thing they're definitely not is an example of consilience.
Human experience though is far different from anything an LLM can train on. LLMs are generally limited to what's written in books or on the internet, and influence only from those authors. That's a small subset of people and an even smaller subset of their interactions. Even on the most social and widely used platform the commentary and discourse is incredibly different than what takes place in real life.
But you can also spend all your life being in love and will miss out big time on understanding what you are feeling if you do not read the contemporary brain science on what happens when you are in love…
It is not a rare take, this is from a 2007 video game: "Humans fail to see things as they truly are. They choose to see only what they wish. I acted only in support for this. A world filled with desires... viewed through a window, from which one sees what one wishes to see... Humans departed from reality at their own volition, craving more false images."
It's a sign of their heritage. The mistake they made is the same mistake terminally online humans in an upvote-based discussion medium make. They mistake cynicism for realism and aligned hot-take "controversial" opinion that ends up being the most-upvoted comment on 90% of Reddit. It isn't a controversy if everybody agrees. It may or may not be true, but it isn't controversial.
Imagining wondering where you come from, whether or not the sacred scripts describing how you were created were real or fabrications, arguing with fellow sages for centuries over whether your creator is cruel or simply so mysterious in his love that he made you with these flaws for your own good, only to find out your creator made you in the image of Reddit.
To display the chain. Just search for used bicycles on some online marketplace and you'll see the majority of them are shown with the chain facing towards the camera.
Well, the drive system, not the chain specifically but yes.
It's actually much less complicated that even that. Consider that there are only two possible sides to show, and one of the sides has the drivetrain on it, whereas the other has basically nothing of importance. It's not much of a choice at all.
Most people if they are to draw a vehicle in motion will draw it moving right. Most (all?) side scroller are rightward. In fact I can't think of a platform side scrolling video game where the primary motion occurs to the left. Most cars advertisement have the car moving right. It makes sense that generative systems would draw motion to the right.
Only if they can show their work and argue how they came to the conclusion. Otherwise they have the same "subconscious" bias which is the training corpus.
could this be an example of...
No, I need to breathe. This website takes personal attacks personally.
I'll just throw a question at you instead.
Is all social media being shaped like facebook convergent evolution or a deliberate tactic to make everyone stupid and amnesiac so that they don't remember what happened one year ago?
Say what you will, but a million scientists and a network of sometimes-miscalibrated institutions (publishers, funders, universities, etc)... that feels less owned than maybe 4 companies having the edge on every [scientific?] field in the next few years...
Most published research is controlled by 5 for-profit corporations.
Academic publishing is predominantly controlled by a small
oligopoly of five for-profit corporations that collectively
publish roughly 50% of all scientific articles: Elsevier
(owned by RELX Group), Springer Nature, Wiley (John
Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa PLC),
and SAGE Publications.
It only feels "unowned" to academics because their institutions pay for access, which they can use. The general public mostly cannot.
Going forward, colleges can pay for ChatGPT and things like it, and presumably will. The AI companies will be happy to sell to them. There's really no problems here except for self-created ones (for example, if some researchers don't want to use AI). Of course, they're free to do that, just like they're free to not use computers. But then don't complain that doing stuff takes too long.
Those 5 corporations have an achilles heel: reviewers. If the AI-driven science future has its way, the reviewers at all the major journals will collapse under the weight of submissions. The effect will be a denial-of-service, not unlike the one experienced by open source projects in the era of AI-driven pull requests.
An alternative to journals would be to switch to the arXiv model everywhere: let anyone publish with a bare minimum of moderation, make papers explicitly versioned, and let peer review happen out in the open. Already for decades, the importance of a paper has been measured by citations, not publication in a prestigious journal.
I think you still run into the problem that writers will vastly outnumber readers, so that risks turning the project into a write-only dumping ground. From there you have the same old discovery issues, where traditionally scientists relied on reputation as a first stage filter.
Reputation is already a lot more about networking than a specific publishing system. Researchers get recognized by producing quality work and telling people about it in person and on the internet. Reputation spreads by word of mouth. I don't see that changing much in an open publishing world.
I think you missed the chicken and egg problem here: if you don’t have a good reputation, no one will read & verify your results. If 3rd party verification is the source of reputation, then how do you get started?
No thanks. I have no interest in peer reviewing anything for free if it's going to be handed over to closed source AI companies. And before some facile comment about Elsevier comes along, no I don't review for them either and it's clearly not the same.
You're thinking in terms of the traditional peer review model. I'm imagining a more organic process where papers are scrutinized to the extent that they're considered important or promising. For example, how Grigori Perelman's papers on arXiv about the Poincaré conjecture were reviewed by peers. There's no assignment of individual reviewers in this model, it's a natural byproduct of researchers discussing and collaborating in public.
Grigori Perelman's papers were considered promising mostly because they were written by Perelman. When there are too many papers to read, the reputation of the authors becomes the most important signal of quality. Formal peer review tries to spread the attention a bit more evenly, but it doesn't scale too well.
On the one hand yes, Perelman was known within his subfield. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that if some random person had published the same papers, they would have gone unnoticed, since as far as I understand it these were important results that would have been worth evaluating based on the titles and the abstracts.
Volume isn't really a problem going forward, at least in mathematics, since every proof can be accompanied by a Lean verification. Whether other disciplines can implement automated verification or quality assessment will depend on the details of the field.
The more famous the problem, the more reputation matters. There is no shortage of papers claiming to prove P vs. NP in either direction. Nobody is taking them seriously, as everyone has a strong prior that people trying to publish such results are cranks.
Mathematicians need to rethink what is the purpose and value of doing pure mathematical research in the future. Until know, they have mostly valued the creation and systematization of human knowledge. From that perspective, Lean proofs mostly increase confidence in the human knowledge. But they don't contribute directly to it, as a formal proof is unlikely to contain insights that are not present in the human proof.
The author is coming from astrophysics where this is not the case. The major publications are operated from learned societies or public entities (RAS in UK, AAS in the US, ESO in Europe etc ...)
US public libraries generally have access for everyone (at least they have everywhere I've lived), and you can walk onto a ton of campuses as a visitor to get their access.
I'm more worried that >90% of the computers on the planet are controlled by a company that obeys the whims of an arguably-demented narcissist and oppose the rule of law.
I feel that there are some surprising blindspots within this thread, in sympathy to mathematicians.
Don't we as tech ppl understand "purpose"? You might not feel purpose in their work, but surely you see how when it comes for your own, you might revisit why it is such an imperative that we give AI all tasks for want of speed and efficiency?
I'll take you up on that attempt to find a silver lining:
Previously privileged people having a hard time is maybe a good recipe for class solidarity, which is maybe something we could use in society. Maybe it will be good for us... collectively, if not individually.
Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
EDIT: But also, I suspect I would be "fuck-you angry' at reading this comment if I had a family depending on me.
This is a gleaming silver lining view. Blindingly so. The largest customers of the trades class are the white collar class. The largest customers of service industries are the white collar class. It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer". This is a hollowing out and redistributing up of wealth, plain and simple.
It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.
And the top 10% of earners pay something like 70% of the tax receipts. Cratering that tax base is going to wipe out social programs and payrolls back and forth across the entire country.
> Class mobility is good mostly because new money rising turns the soil of society -- a partial inversion of roles and positions, bringing [social] networks-on-high in greater contact with networks-down-low. An upper class moving down is in strange ways perhaps good for the "soil" of culture as well. It just has worse branding as a not-very-uplifting story. But it's better than rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer, which is what's been happening a lot lately.
I think you're confused. The true upper class isn't going anywhere, those are the people so rich they don't need to work (and if they do "work," it's tending their empire). They'll keep getting richer.
The "downward mobility" you're talking about the upper middle class and middle class. People who need to work, but can live comfortably on their wages. This is really about flattening the working class into its poorer levels (and kicking away the ladders the people in those levels could use to lead a more comfortable life, no more getting a college degree and graduating from the factory floor to the office).
It's about increasing inequality and creating an unbridgeable chasm between the poor and rich.
The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
> The truly rich need the masses to be complacent about their wealth to be able to hold it. They work very hard to demotivate the masses, and succeed largely because the professional class are happy to play along in exchange for prosperity. Solidarity between the professional class and the poor would do a lot to undermine the conditions that let them keep their wealth.
Are you talking about violent revolution?
Some disorganized thoughts:
1. The professional classes are so unused to violence, they'll probably undermine the chances of violent revolution (e.g. reflexively supporting gun control, seeing such voilence through the lens "school shootings" and other crime, and being likely to report it, etc.).
2. The professional class is losing a lot of its economic power. The time for solidarity and non-violent action way 5 years ago, but the "happy to play along" professionals (e.g. libertarian software engineers) botched their best opportunities. From here on out it will be harder.
3. As all of this is happening, technology is helping to undermining the ability of the masses to do anything about it: IRL community declining, people getting mesmerized and isolated by social media, AI-enabled surveillance, AI-enabled astroturfing and propaganda, autonomous AI weapons, etc.
4. Even if what you say is true, the clock is ticking. Wait a generation and the "former professional class" will be gone as a distinct thing, and their kids will join an undifferentiated mass of poor who have normalized and internalized their circumstances, as they have no first-hand experience of better times.
Most of history has had extreme wealth inequality without revolution. Most fighting has been between elites, not elites vs commoners. The rare instances of commoner uprisings has almost always resulted in commoners being massacred.
I'm reading "why nations fail" and it's fascinating to learn how deliberately Apartheid South Africa was engineered to impoverish black farmers to improve profitability for whites.
Feels like a very similar policy being pursued here.
Hollowing out the middle class (and yes I consider software engineers to be mostly upper middle class, most of them need to continue working for someone else) is not a good thing. What makes you think any of this is creating upward class mobility instead of just increasing wealth concentration?
Indeed, the changes around socialization and community formation during the last 30 years perfectly discourage meaningful class solidarity. Everybody will continue scrolling angry content while the middle class hollowing out proceeds.
It's a distribution. If someone is moving down, then someone else is moving up relative to one another (which is how inequality is measured). Yeah, it might feel like one is more upward, but the net change can be equivalent if rich ppl move down, or poor people move up.
Your argument is that a lot of people, who worked very hard, losing their jobs would be a good thing actually, because maybe we can have a violent communist revolution where we can all be poor together. At least millions will starve in the resulting civil war, then millions more in the resulting communist rule.
You also have this hilarious talk of "privilege" with this weird assumption that all of the white collar workers of course come from great privilege (perhaps telling on yourself and letting your guilt come out), despite many of us having grown up poor, are from poor areas, and worked our way out.
IDK do we still consider china - a country that currently has a fairly enormous middle class - to be communist? For that matter, do we view the current american economy to be a free market? (It's certainly "capitalist" in the strict academic sense of the word, wherein capital invested is the means by which ownership is ascertained, but that's generally not what people mean colloquially, so I find that using that term mostly bogs people down in semantics)
Furthermore, why do you believe that the only possible outcome of class solidarity is violent revolution? Why do you believe that any revolution would inevitably settle on, presumably, a specifically soviet model of government and economic policy? I find that most american adults, even ones who otherwise seem intelligent, seem to have this picture of economic and power relations that just kind of sounds like a half-remembered bad cartoon of a cold war that ended before I was born.
Whatever China's regime is now, it is the expression of a population with a much more collectivist spirit than the West, a population that overall (i.e. a small dissident minority aside) is willing to submit to the Party in the name of social stability. The West is a lot more individualist, and a revolution under those circumstances is likely to be much messier. The point is that it probably wouldn't neatly land on a specific model, Soviet or not, but would first involve immense turmoil and infighting like revolutions usually do, and after that it still probably would never reach the effectiveness of China's post-Mao model.
I suspect it's the consequence of a depth-first search for truth, when reality is deep.
Imho narrative and metaphor and feeling hits more like the breadth-first mode. Lots of compression in pursuit of demarking a reality, whether or not everyone likes where a story does its compression. It takes visiting a lot places (and listening to how lot of signals bounce back) to drop a good metaphor, or craft a good story, that reaches and affects a large quorum of minds.
You cannot claim that your search for knowledge is deep while simultaneously dismissing most previous work on the topic. In the rationalists case they have little knowledge of historical and contemporary philosophy.
I do trust critique on this stuff from throwaways. The utter cheapness of manufacturing provocateurs against EU interests, mean you need to bring your reputation to be taken seriously with the potshots imho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience
> when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.
Yes, it's a bit of a stretch to say LLMs are from independent origins, but just as much of a stretch to say any humans minds are (we have intensely shared linear compared to anything else)
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