| ▲ | amelius 21 hours ago |
| Humans evolved to think the night sky is beautiful. That's also training. If humans were zapped by lightning every time they went outside at night, they would not think that a night sky is beautiful. |
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| ▲ | latexr 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Being struck by lighting may affect your desire to go outside, but it has zero correlation with the sky’s beauty. Outer space is beautiful, poison dart frogs are beautiful, lava is beautiful. All of them can kill or maim you if you don’t wear protection, but that doesn’t take away from their beauty. Conversely, boring safe things aren’t automatically beautiful. I see no reasonable reason to believe that finding beauty in the night sky is any sort of “training”. |
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| ▲ | ninetyninenine 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you think a fat pig is beautiful? Like a hairy fat pig that snorts and rolls in the mud… is this animal so beautiful to you that you would want to make love to this animal? Of course not! Because pigs are intrinsically and universally ugly and sex with a pig is universally disgusting. But you realize that horny male pigs think this is beautiful right? Horny pigs want to fuck other pigs because horny pigs think fat sweaty female hogs are beautiful. Beauty is arbitrary. It is not intrinsic. Even among life forms and among humans we all have different opinions on what is beautiful. I guarantee you there are people who think the night sky is ugly af. Attributes like beauty are not such profound categories that separate an LLM from humanity. These are arbitrary classifications and even though you can’t fully articulate the “experience” you have of “beauty” the LLM can’t fully articulate its “experience” either. You think it’s impossible for the LLM to experience what you experience… but you really have no evidence for this because you have no idea what the LLM experiences internally. Just like you can’t articulate what the LLM experiences neither can the LLM. These are both black box processes that can’t be described but neither is very profound given the fact that we all have completely different opinions on what is beautiful. | | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Do you think a fat pig is beautiful? Like a hairy fat pig that snorts and rolls in the mud… is this animal so beautiful to you that you would want to make love to this animal? I don't want to make love to the night sky, so that last bit is completely irrelevant to the question of beauty. As for whether a pig is beautiful, sure, in its own way. I think they're nice animals and there is something beautiful in seeing them enjoy their little lives. > Of course not! Because pigs are intrinsically and universally ugly... It would seem not. | | | |
| ▲ | latexr 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Is this for real? Frankly, I think you should be the one answering that question. You’re comparing appreciating looking at the sky to bestiality. Then you follow it up with another barrage of wrong assumptions about what I think and can or cannot articulate. None of that has anything to do with the argument. I didn’t even touch on LLMs, my point was squarely about the human experience. Please don’t assume things you know nothing about regarding other people. The HN guidelines ask you to not engage in bad faith and to steel man the other person’s argument. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You’re comparing appreciating looking at the sky to bestiality. That’s my point. You think beauty is profound but this is arbitrary and not at all different from bestiality. It’s only your intrinsic cultural biases that cause you to look at one with disdain. Don’t be a snob. This is HN. We are supposed to be logical and immune from the biases that plague other forums. Beauty is no more profound than bestiality. It’s all about what you find beautiful. If you find beasts beautiful then you call it beastiality? What is so different about finding a beast beautiful versus the night sky? Snobbery, that’s what. It’s just semantic manipulation and association with crudeness that prevents you from thinking logically. HNers are better than this and so are you. Don’t pretend you don’t get it and that my comparison to beastiality is so left field that it’s incomprehensible. You get it. Follow the rules and take it in good faith like you said yourself. > The HN guidelines ask you to not engage in bad faith Fair I edited the part that asks “is this for real” that’s literally the only part. I also find your dismissiveness of my arguments as “bestiality” is bad faith and manipulative. I clearly wasn’t doing that. Pigs are attracted to pigs that is normal. Humans are not attracted to pigs. That is also normal. I took normal attributes of human nature and compared it to reality. You took it in bad faith and dismissed me which is against the very rules you stated. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Compare with news stories from last decade, about people in Pakistan developing a deep fear of clear skies over several years of US drone strikes in the area. They became trained to associate good weather with not beauty, but impending death. |
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| ▲ | latexr 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fear and a sense of beauty aren’t mutually exclusive. It is perfectly congruent to fear a snake, or bear, or tiger in your presence, yet you can still find them beautiful. |
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| ▲ | spuz 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Interestingly this is a question I've had for a while. Night brings potentially deadly cold, predators, a drastic limit in vision so why do we find the sunset and night sky beautiful. Why do we stop and watch the sun set - something that happens every day - rather than prepare for the food and warmth we need to survive the night? |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe it's that we only pause to observe them and realize they're beautiful, when we're feeling safe enough? "Beautiful sunset" evokes being on a calm sea shore with a loved one, feeling safe. It does not evoke being on a farm and looking up while doing chores and wishing they'd be over already. It does not evoke being stranded on an island, half-starved to death. | | |
| ▲ | amelius 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | We think it's beautiful because it's like a background that we don't have to think about. If that background were hostile, we'd have to think and we would not think it looks beautiful. |
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| ▲ | delusional 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're entering the domain of philosophy. There's a concept of "the sublime" that's been richly explored in literature. If you find the subject interesting, I'd recommend you starting with Immanuel Kant. |
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