YHK - yet another hacker news clone

And now I've got "one winged angel" stuck in my head, thanks

For software or IT folk to be doing this would be indeed worrying (and I bet some are, and I'm worried about them!)

For civilians though... They've been told it's AI, it can do stuff for them. And one thing they do is log in to stuff. I don't think they're stupid. Just that what's obvious to IT folk is simply not at all obvious to the average person. Maybe that's on us not on them?

"despite that this isn't some universal constant in the training data"

Isn't it though? It's not exactly an uncommon answer to the question. Basically the same input given to basically the same algorithms yield basically the same result isn't really that stunning. They certainly aren't independently reaching this answer, their paths to this answer are extremely, extremely heavily correlated.

If they gave a really different answer that wasn't heavily represented in their training data that would be at least something interesting. But this is basically what I'd expect.

It doesn't mean they're right or wrong. Humans think it about other humans for good reasons too. It just means it's not that surprising, which to put it another way, doesn't carry much information.

> despite that this isn't some universal constant in the training data.

Seems to me that the opinion being a consistent among LLMs show that it is in fact a constant in the training data, just not apparent. The idea that “humans would rather be wrong together than right alone” seems to ring pretty true to me. I would not be surprised after training on all human communication this pattern emerged.

There is no interesting interpretation, beyond e.g...

If you ask all these models "Four score and seven what?" They'll all say the same thing. There's essentially no difference here.

When you make the training sets large enough, likely all a superset of the common crawl dataset, there is going to be a massive amount in common, and a massive amount of duplication of common subject matter and shared opinions.

What's mildly interesting to me is not the similar answers but the similar interpretation of the question as more about non-controversial human foibles and inconsistencies of belief and action. But I guess that's on us, as authors of the training material, reflecting common views on what is or is not controversial.

Especially for someone not "well exposed" to generated text, they might think the words carry meaning the way they do when someone thought about the question and came to an answer. If anyone can interpret this, it's the people who know what they're dealing with (be it from exposure or, better, from a conceptual understanding)

the sentence before that is even better:

"A 2020 review of the scientific literature on backfire effects found that there have been widespread failures to replicate their existence, even under conditions that theoretically would be favorable to observing them."

queue Michele McLaughlin

I'm not sure it doesn't change much, on a 50 year timeline maybe. But people were eating other humans and slaving away (making slaves of others that is) not too long ago, rape and pillage was acceptable, societies sacrificed children, it's changed quite a bit in 30 generations. Those past societies were all quite materially successful as well when you look at today's measure of"GDP" comparatively.

What will it look like in another 30 generations? It's honestly a fascinating question but I have no answer of course.

But this in itself is a tautology. It is because it is, without an analytical perspective on how it could be worse or better given different choices by the actors in a system.

Historically societies have collapsed all the time, so there are obviously societies that have made better choices than other ones.

What is a human? There is the animal body part of us, the thing that wants to survive, the fight or flight. But there is also another mental part of us that shows different emergent behaviors than an animal. For example if I dropped you off in the woods as a very young child, you would be an animal, you would share very few modern 'thinking' traits with human society. That is human society and what it does emerges from the complexity of our interactions. It doesn't take much research to realize our interactions and behaviors have grown far more complex in the last 10,000 years. And then in the last 500 years there's been further acceleration with the industrial age and the rise of technology.

I think neither the 'any set of morals is equally correct and workable' nor 'there is one fixed set of morality that is universal across time, place, and culture' is really defensible. It seems like morality is a set of ideas much like any other, and subject to selection pressure: some morals are more capable of surviving and propagating than others, and the common features we see across cultures are representative of that. But also we might expect that they shift with the structure of society and that has changed drastically because while human genetic evolution is progressing on a much longer timescale than recent history, memetic evolution is far faster (though for things like morality, still at generational timescales).

Even though humans haven't changed anatomically, culture and society has, which is what defines morality.

It's not the case that all aspects are constant. There's some common themes across cultures and times, but it's definitely not the case that the morality of ancient people was the same as today.

Is hammurabi's code moral? I don't know if I think that someone who takes out a person's eye deserves to have their own eye taken out also

Seriously. This idea that humanity has not spent millennia analyzing these concepts is pervasive in the modern world, and the only thing I can think to attribute it to is a lack of education. Not because I want to be insensitive, but because as soon as you start absorbing material and integrating the real timeline, you can't unsee it.

I did a philosophy minor, one class of which was the philosophy of ethics. There are many rules that definitely are not ethical today even if they were in the past so I don't think the point you're making really holds. Hammurabi (an eye for an eye) is probably one of the worst examples you could have cited.

You take a class. Do you think coveting is immoral? Retributive justice? Human sacrifice?

I think its more accurate to say where you find consensus in morality, e.g. murder is wrong outside authorized violence (e.g. war or policing), you also find extensive selective pressure behind this behavior. It makes sense that all collective society cultures would outlaw murder; such a behavior is incompatible with collective living behavior whether you are in a cave or a modern skyscraper. Early societies have always been rejecting those alleles from their gene pool.

When you find shades of grey and great spectrum of opinions across time or space, its more that there isn't a strong selective pressure either way. How people are expected to dress is a good example of this. This has no real affect on society behavior or fecundity, so you see a spectrum of opinions that explain the differences between what you see in the middle east and a beach in brazil.

Hogwash. We don't even have a consistent set of ethics on how to treat animals today, in the age of the Internet. We have people who refuse to eat meat because of how the animals are treated, and we have places where the locals make sport out of torturing animals to death, and indeed, our own recent history includes that as well (look up badgering).

Not to mention, the variation in treatment of homosexuals (including what constitutes homosexuality), people of different skin colors, handedness, how rape is treated in various cultures (often tied in with notions of property and ownership of all things), or even the various definitions of rape... The list goes on.

Maybe there's a core there in terms of how we treat a given in-group, but equally important is who belongs in that group and why, and that part seems to be tremendously flexible. Ditto for what constitutes acceptable treatment of outsiders.

LLMs are not the machines I am referring to, machine sentience, if achieved, will require a "state" and the ability to analyze, act on, and update it. LLMs are a small piece of what that machinery could look like but they are not really complex enough to get where we want to go on their own.

Another reason the big labs have not even talked about this lately because its obvious throwing more compute at LLMs wont go anywhere, the smaller silent players who are off the radar at the moment are having some interesting moments tho.

>while having way less diversity of answers to that question than humans would.

Why is this ironic? The actual number of different LLMs is tiny. And a lot of those are just distilled from SOTA models.

>The weights are initialized randomly and in theory the labs should have quite some divergence in datasets by now due to different scraping,

I think the opposite, the models actually converge over time. They ingest FAR more data than any human ever could in countless lifetimes. Any one particular bit of data may only have a part in a trillion of effect. From this data you start to reach means and statistical averages across all models.

Now, I don't always believe it will be this way. As training models get cheaper and faster we will see unique LLMs start to diverge and be used more often.

> while having way less diversity of answers to that question than humans would

Isn't that to be somewhat expected due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem ?

> Elias and Elara

Wow, I hadn't heard of this. Fascinating to think about parallels with humans who also seem to develop similar proto-stories in independent populations.(e.g. religions involving Invisible gods).

I think you are interpreting “mashup” to mean something like a collage where there’s snippets of a literal piece of this next to a literal piece of that.

But the language model captures not just literal patterns but also patterns of patterns and higher order structures. This is what is mashed up. The model itself doesn’t capture anything beyond what it was trained on but that’s quite enough, it is always a bigger training set than most humans have read on in a lifetime.

This brute force approach is very effective.

Even if that's true it's kind of interesting because the models were asked to give their most controversial opinion. A controversial opinion is supposed to be something that most people don't agree with. Taken literally you cannot have an opinion that's both the average of what most people think and also controversial.

So either that's not what's happening here, or what we're getting is "what do most people think most people don't think about humanity".

If the latter, then it casts new light on the debates over whether LLMs can replace all white collar work. Because some of the most valuable human work is breaking false consensus. Steve Jobs, early Google, for that matter early OpenAI all succeeded because they bet hard on ideas others were rejecting. Is that a durable source of human advantage?

I would even say it's the opinion we have about others not ourselves. As most prose condemns 'the herd'.

I tried it with Gemini, and essentially the answer translated back to English is that "free will is just a carbon-based algorithm."

> What would be more fascinating is for it to explain how it came to these conclusions

The thing is that it didn't "come to these conclusions". The "conclusions" were present pre-formed in the training data, and what it spat out was some statistical mashup of that.

If you asked the model how it came to these conclusions, you'll get more of the same - it'll look at what it spat out and re-ingested and give you a statistically plausible mashup of how the authors of the training data might have said they came to such conclusions.

It's all just prediction - "what would the training data say?" (taking into account what was reinforced/amplified by post-training).

Why french, Nietzsche was German?

>> Looking forward to when it gets past nihilism to absurdism.

> Inherent meaning, purpose and objective value for random agglutinations of particles is a ridiculous concept.

Absurdism believes the same, but simply posits that we don't have to be a whiny baby about it.

Do we? Is it?

Having spent the last month staring into the abyss and Eldrich-level dread that is a pure, materialistic, reductionist universe, I wouldn’t wish that belief on anyone. There’s a deep, grasping of “there’s got to be more”, “this can’t all be chance”, “evolutionary hackery and garbage seems a poor explanation for love, compassion, empathy, and many other self-sacrificial practices we have”.

There’s only a few reasons that are slowly pulling me from that hell; but I cannot imagine that “most” people live here, even “deep down”.

They all got trained on the same books and internet cesspools, this is not some great mystery of consciousness.

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.

It still surprises me that is you ask several models to come up with any random word, many output the same word.

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.

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.

The cynic in me sees similar systems trained on essentially identical sources of information regurgitating an extremely shallow and popular viewpoint espoused on the websites they were primarily trained on (i.e. Reddit and other social media).

If all we want is an echo of our existing biases we can achieve that without spending quite so much energy and money on the endeavor.

Predominantly trained on atheist text maybe?

Also, would you want to know an LLM's religious/spiritual orientation? I rather have it help me code.

AI thinks atheism is "controversial"

Well, ya can't spell atheist without ai.

I would like some Russian Literature recommendations related to this. I vaguely recall We by Zamyatin addressing something like this a good few decades ago.