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| ▲ | roywiggins 8 days ago | parent | next [-] | | One thing I noticed from chat #1 is that you've got a sort of "God of the gaps" ("woo of the gaps"?) thing going on- you've bundled together a bunch of stuff that is currently beyond understanding and decided that they must all be related and explainable by the same thing. Needless to say this is super common when people go down quasi-scientific/spiritual/woo rabbit holes- all this stuff that scientists don't understand must be related! It must all have some underlying logic! But there's not much reason to actually think that, a priori. One thing that the news stories about people going off the deep end with LLMs is that that basically never share the full transcripts, which is of course their right, but I wonder if it would nevertheless be a useful thing for people to be able to study. On the other hand, they're kind of a roadmap to turning certain people insane, so maybe it's best that they're not widely distributed. I don't usually believe in "cognitohazards" but if they exist, it seems like we have maybe invented them with these chatbots... | | |
| ▲ | neom 8 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think it's bad or a big deal for people to look for wide connections in things, or at least to explore different ideas in life and trying to understand them deeper - Can it lead to problematic behaviour, sure, and I think for me at least that was introduced when the LLM started to try to convince ME my ideas were good, even though I was effectively just day dreaming with it. For me personally, I don't feel I need to look any more foolish than I feel, even now knowing how openai had the LLM temperature set, I'm surprised I didn't force myself to be more skeptical, I'm educated I have critical thinking skills (ish)- I should have turned it off sooner rather than driving deeper with it and I guess honestly, I just have too much ego or pride or whatever to show the foolishness: not a great answer. | | |
| ▲ | roywiggins 8 days ago | parent [-] | | One reason I don't engage with LLMs that much is the thought that some engineer at OpenAI might read some of my dumbest thoughts! |
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| ▲ | cruffle_duffle 8 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hah. If those transcripts become public then future LLM’s get trained on them! Who knows what influence that will have. |
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| ▲ | apsurd 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | had a look, I don't see it as bullshit, it's just not groundbreaking. Nature is overwhelmingly non-linear. Most of human scientific progress is based on linear understandings. Linear as in for this input you get this output. We've made astounding progress. Its just not a complete understanding of the natural world because most of reality can't actually be modeled linearly. | | |
| ▲ | neom 8 days ago | parent [-] | | I think it's not as much about how right or wrong or interesting or not the output was, for me anyway, the concern is that I got a bit... lost in myself, I have real things to do that are important to people around me, they do not involve spending hours with an LLM trying to understand the universe. I'm not a physicist, I have a family to provide for, and I suppose someone less lucky than myself could go down a terrible path. | | |
| ▲ | johnisgood 8 days ago | parent [-] | | Okay, but like I said before in another comment, I have spent 3 days straight coding, neglecting myself and everything around me in the process. I was learning a lot, coding a lot. I was productive. Of course I should have had some breaks (for my legs and mind, and my body). Just make sure to have breaks. I did not have breaks because I was completely zoned in. I set up a timer by then that remind me to take a break. I checked the content, I do not think that it is useless, and I am sure you have learnt a lot. Perhaps get in a rabbit hole about http://CharlieLabs.ai (your project, before people think I am advertising). :P | | |
| ▲ | roywiggins 8 days ago | parent [-] | | Lengthy ChatGPT rabbit holes are kind of a simulacrum of productivity, they keep you in a flow state but it's liable to be pure cotton candy, not actual productivity. Spending all weekend on a puzzle or a project at least keeps you in a tight feedback loop with something outside your own skull. ChatGPT offers you a perfect mirror of the inside of your own skull while pretending to be a separate entity. I think this is one reason why it can be both compelling and risky to engage deeply with them: it feels like more than it is. It eliminates a lot of the friction that might take you out of a flow state, but without that friction you can just spin out. | | |
| ▲ | johnisgood 8 days ago | parent [-] | | It depends. Do not pursue pure cotton candy. :P | | |
| ▲ | roywiggins 8 days ago | parent [-] | | Put it this way: at least with vibe coding you'll eventually hit something where you realize that it's produced crappy, useless code that you need to throw out. With extended philosophical conversations there is nothing grounding the conversation, nothing to force you to come up short and realize when you've spent hours pursuing something mistaken. It's intellectual empty calories. | | |
| ▲ | bonoboTP 8 days ago | parent [-] | | Depends on how you use it. You can "ground" it by asking what authors have explored this or ask for book recommendations, then read the wiki page of the author, read some texts by them etc. You can explore the history as well, like what was happening at that time, who were important contemporaries or influences, people who thought the opposite etc. I've found interesting books (that are somewhat niche but fairly well known in the field, non-fringe) this way. |
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| ▲ | lubujackson 8 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have no idea what this is going on about. But it is clearly much more convincing with (unchecked) references all over the place. This seems uncannily similar to anti-COVID vaccination thinking. It isn't people being stupid because if you dig you can find heaps of papers and references and details and facts. So much so that the human mind can be easily convinced. Are those facts and details accurate? I doubt it, but the volume of slightly wrong source documents seems to add up to something convincing. Also similar to how finance people made tranches of bad loans and packaged them into better rated debt, magically. It seems to make sense at each step but it is ultimately an illusion. |
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| ▲ | jeff-davis 8 days ago | parent | next [-] | | My friend once told me that physics formulas are like compression algorithms: a short theory can explain many data points that fit a pattern. If that's true, then perhaps AIs would come up with something just by looking at existing observations and "summarizing" them. Far-fetched, but I try to keep an open mind. | | |
| ▲ | iwontberude 7 days ago | parent [-] | | After seeing half a dozen accounts of people losing their minds going down this rabbithole, it's more likely a good indicator of mental instability. |
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| ▲ | gitremote 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics." - Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-c... | | |
| ▲ | iwontberude 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Couldn't happen to a nicer person, hopefully he's got some good health insurance. |
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| ▲ | kaivi 8 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The premise is so asinine I believe it's actually the opposite! Anybody armed with this tool and little prior training could learn the difference between a Samsung S11 and the symmetry, take a new configuration from the endless search space that it is, correct for the dozen edge cases like the electron-phonon coupling, and publish. Maybe even pass peer review if they cite the approved sources. No requirement to work out the Lagrangians either, it is also 100% testable once we reach Kardashev-II. This says more about the sad state of modern theoretical physics than the symbolic gymnastics required to make another theory of everything sound coherent. I'm hoping that this new age of free knowledge chiropractors will change this field for the better. | | |
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