[FRIAM] PhDs and curiosity

Thu May 29 17:48:10 EDT 2025

I have been working my way through this video,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBL7J0kgldU&t=1046s . The speaker pokes at
LLMs in some very clever and systematic ways. He may have some answers to
your questions.
The video above starts when he talks about how adding junk internet crawls
to LLM training data makes the LLM significantly less knowledgeable. I
wonder if our own brains are similar?
His talk points out a handful of other quirks about LLMs, like they seem to
exhibit regret when they get the answer wrong.

_ Cody Smith _
d00d3rs0n at gmail.com

On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 12:31 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my fit of insomnia a couple nights ago, I kept turning over the hype
> around "agentic" LLMs. Both Pieter and Marcus are right in that, yes, LLMs
> must be prompted but all that's needed is automated prompting. Were we to
> equip LLMs with multimodal sensors, all of which have some "natural"
> frequency, that would provide the automatic prompting, some random, some
> not.
>
> Dave raises the issue of cultural artifact half-life. So in a mixture of
> experts (MoE) sense, maybe a set of parameters encodes a 4chan meme and
> another encodes Analytic Philosophy. The lifetime of any one of those
> encodings would be set by the frequenc[y|ies] and distributions of the
> relevant sensor inputs (including the feedback loops in which they
> participate).
>
> The question I guess I'm asking is whether the LLMs can automatically
> discover new stability states or not. Do paths off of, say, the 4chan meme
> lead to new stable encodings or does it devolve into noise? Arriving at a
> new stable point would be evidence of curiosity and a devolution into noise
> would be akin to a psychological disorder. Quickly hopping from one "hobby"
> to another would be one personality. Focusing on a single "hobby" for a
> long time would be a different personality. But curiosity would be
> represented by the facility with which one *can* hop, even if that LLM
> finds it distasteful to hop around all the time.
>
> My whipping post is that our intention is to build LLMs that capture *all*
> of *every* curious thing humans have ever written/talked about. Agentic
> LLMs slice that totalist space into pieces. The purpose of your Agent(s)
> isn't to be able to do anything anywhere and at any time. The purpose is to
> do some things, somewhere, at some times. This seems to defy the MoE
> conception.
>
> Maybe what's required is that we train foundation models on the entire
> human corpus, but then fine-tune each agent toward their sub-domains? Your
> 4chan posting Agent gets very low frequency whole corpus updates, but high
> frequency - focused - sub-domain updates.
>
> Before, I was thinking germline changes are architectural. So the only way
> out of our current Exploitation of the transformer is a new/better
> architecture. But if we assume the transformer is sufficient, then germline
> might be that low frequency updating of the whole corpus. So even if, say,
> logical positivism is non-arbitrarily distinguishable from analytic
> philosophy (or 4chan posts are distinct from bluesky posts) each whole
> corpus update has to contain it all.
>
> And cultural changes would then be in the mixture. Sure the youngsters
> wear what looks like bell bottoms these days. But somewhere in their
> gametes lies the encoding for actual bell bottoms.
>
> On 5/27/25 10:17 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > Meh.
> >
> > *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Pieter
> Steenekamp
> > *Sent:* Tuesday, May 27, 2025 8:53 PM
> > *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> > *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] PhDs and curiosity
> >
> > In my view, current AI systems are not capable of curiosity-driven
> science. Take DeepMind’s AlphaFold, for instance—it’s hard to argue that
> its contribution isn’t “real” science. Predicting the 3D structures of over
> 200 million proteins is an extraordinary achievement, especially when you
> consider that determining the structure of a single complex protein was
> once enough to earn a PhD.
> >
> > Now, I realize I’m being a bit cheeky here: the brilliant creators of
> AlphaFold received a Nobel Prize, yet poor AlphaFold—who tirelessly
> crunched the data and did all the work—got nothing. Shame!
> >
> > But to return to the core point: AlphaFold operates in a fundamentally
> mechanical way. It was trained on existing protein structures and learned
> to identify patterns. Of course, that’s a simplification, but the crucial
> point is this—AlphaFold wasn’t curious. It didn’t form questions, seek out
> unknowns, or explore beyond its programming. It simply did what it was
> designed to do.
> >
> > On Tue, 27 May 2025 at 23:50, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm
> <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
> >
> >     Can't speak to germs, but the cultural half is, I believe, dead on.
> >
> >     Two of the most pervasive aspects of culture are "worldview" and
> "language." Sometime after the Age of Reason, Western Industrial culture
> adopted a worldview of the Universe as a machine (clockworks, steam
> engines, computers) exemplified by 19th century physics of La Place and
> Mach. (All that pesky quantum stuff was kept in the closet almost to the
> 1950s.) Physics dominated the University and all the new disciplines that
> came into existence wanted to be just like Physics. Business adopted the
> machine metaphor and touted "scientific management." Computer Science and
> Software Engineering. Sociology split from Anthropology (actually more of a
> parallel development) based on the former's desire to be more scientific
> and experimental. Cognitive 'Science' tried to subsume much of psychology,
> tolerating Freud and eschewing Jung. Philosophy moved to Logical Positivism
> and its successor Analytic Philosophy.
> >
> >     All of this, mostly, non-consciously; the same way that culture
> influences the behavior of those within it.
> >
> >     Had a great conversation with a History of Science professor the
> other day about how misogyny became entangled in the 'scientific' and still
> manifests itself in language, behaviors, and worldview of the university as
> a whole.
> >
> >     davew
> >
> >
> >     On Tue, May 27, 2025, at 3:11 PM, glen wrote:
> >      > So, with the recent conversations about when an LLM might be
> considered
> >      > alive and the extent to which some/all PhD programs represent
> >      > intelligence/knowledge, I landed on this question:
> >      >
> >      > Is curiosity-driven science like germ-line genetics, whereas
> >      > ideals/values-driven science is like cultural inheritance?
> >      >
> >      > The analogy seems OK to me. Nothing short of significant trauma
> can
> >      > divert the curious. But a cultural value/ideal (including things
> like
> >      > capitalism or whatnot) seems like it could pretty easily fade
> beyond 1
> >      > or 2 generations. Please trash this idea! I want to use it at the
> pub.
> >      > But if it doesn't pass muster, here, I may not. >8^D
>
>
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