| ▲ | altmanaltman 7 hours ago | |
1. It's not from "Robin Williams", it's a part of a movie where Williams is playing a character. If actors actually were responsible for their actions and everything was real, I wonder how Christopher Waltz was living in US during the slave trade AND was a german nazi officer also? What a man he must be! 2. The whole movie is basically opposite Office Space. A white man finds a lot of opportunities because he is a genius and everyone bends over backwards for them. Matt Damon wrote his chatacter as a power fantasy "oh you know hes like a normal everyday guy but hes also extremely smart and MIT and NSA will do anything to hire this person just because!" 3. Will Hunting's main problem was being afraid of failure once he actually has to use his knowlege on practical things. He was afraid academic people will think of him as a fool so he puts up the bookish smart ego to prevent that hurt. It literally does not apply to LLMs if you take even a minute to think about it apart from a surface meme level. | ||
| ▲ | thisoneisreal 7 hours ago | parent [-] | |
You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things. The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools." As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life. | ||