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glen wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">It
prolly won't surprise you that I disagree (I think). Those
intuitions that we develop may be a) interesting to like-minded
people, b) valid to those who hold the same value/logic systems
[⛧], and c) useful for sussing out us-vs-them [in|out]groups.
<br>
</blockquote>
I appreciate (and depend on?) this disagreement<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">
But they don't necessarily track reality.</blockquote>
There is <i>Reality</i> and there is <i>Intersubjective Reality</i>
(similar but different to KellyAnne's "alternate facts")... I don't
think they track reality *any better* than the collective corpus of
human expression they were trained on?<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com"> You
might even say (ala the Interface Theory of Perception) those
intuitions are inversely proportional to one's ability to track
reality, the stronger they are, the less they track. This is
adjacent to Eric's full tea cup.
<br>
</blockquote>
My only (intended) claim is that machine and human intuitions are
similar in that they nominally interpolate and extapolate the
high-dimensional space of all the linguistic/symbolic artifacts they
have been exposed to. In deference to my partial agreement with
DaveW, I recognize that written/linguistic "symbolic artifacts" are
a tiny subset of the world even if we acknowledge the linguistic
artifacts (writing) about the world.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">
E.g. someone like Denis Noble, whose had a fantastic career in
science. But now that he's old and out of his lane, his confidence
puts him out in front of his skis:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Noble#The_Third_Way_of_Evolution">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Noble#The_Third_Way_of_Evolution</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
I'm definitely old and out of any lane I might have ever held or
been in for more than a few wild slaps of my arms.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">
If we allow something like an intuition in LLMs, it should be
clear that in order for them to track reality, they need "online"
learning (as Marcus has proposed) and/or robotic embodiment to be
able to interact with the reality we expect/want those intuitions
to be about. </blockquote>
Agreed, their "intuition" is currently limited to intuition about
the things they have "heard" us talking about... they are the
ultimate gossip-mongers, listening and passing on and making up new
juicy bits from the old bits. I find most pre-enlightenment
"science" to be the same: rumours and gossip about "how rigid
bodies in motion act" without the empirical grounding of say
"dropping a couple of items off the tower of pisa and seeing which
one hits the jerk staring up at them first" or <pick your
favorite story from alchemy, etc>.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">But
where you could argue with me might be on something like "muscle
memory". Turns of phrases in a language should probabilistically
constrain the response from the LLM. This might be similar to the
way some words and phrases roll off the tongue. But in that sort
of case, it's not *intuition* as we might normally think of it ...
it's more like habit or practice. Again the emphasis is more on
the doing than the thinking.
<br>
</blockquote>
Just a facility for the glib? A propensity for riffing without
comprehension? Like me. here. now? (sorta)<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:63b538ef-6f1a-4b40-939c-ddcfd70c8200@gmail.com">
<br>
[⛧] Indeed, the only way "valid" has any meaning at all is in the
context of a language system ... if you fail to say what logic
you're working with, the use of "valid" is invalid. 8^D ... sorry
for the poetic license.
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm not sure this impugnes language models (or other ML/AI
systems) as much as it does the human capabilities they purport to
emulate? My point isn't that LLMs do "really cool and meaningful
things" but rather that what they do *might* not be that
dissimilar from what *we* do in many contexts soe of which we want
to claim is cool and/or meaningful). </p>
<p><anecdote about hand-grinding lenses to make a point about
embodied learning></p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was trained in my physics classes to believe that the actual
hands-on-practice in the lab was important, that there were
things I could learn (ways my intuition could be informed) by
that embodied experience that no amount of reading and/or simple
observation could achieve. I'm still not clear on whether
grinding my own objective reflector and silver sputtering it in
a vacuum chamber improved my understanding of the things in the
sky I then observed with it, but it did do something for me in
terms of an "embodied appreciation" for the statistics and
geometry of spherical and parabolic cross-sections and the
implications of different levels of vacuum, boiling of elemental
silver, thin-films, etc. </p>
<p>My lab-professor wasn't interested in my questions about the
geometric implications (as I saw them) of the "figuring"
techniques which best I could tell took the basic shape of a
very large radius spherical section and added (central deepening
and edge flattening) two more spherical sectionings such that
the final mirror was a piecewise combination of 3 spherical
sections with "maybe" a little feathering or blending between
them. I also worried the question of whether the distance and
*angle* from the boiling silver (strip?) and the lens) mattered
for the thickness/shape of the surface layer. He
(understandably) held that all that maundering and mentating was
masturbatory and "all that mattered" was "that it works". <br>
</p>
<p>I'm glad I did those things and even though "george" can talk
me through and around and up one side and down the other about
DIY reflector construction and be more patient with me about
whether the off-axis silver-sputter layer is "good enough and
nuances of various methods of "figuring" the psuedo-sphere the
primary grinding yields?<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p></anecdote><br>
</p>
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