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That's not a point, you just replaced words but his is true and yours is not. Unless you can explain why "Humans don't make discoveries" is true??? Also this is

That's not a point, you just replaced words but his is true and yours is not. Unless you can explain why "Humans don't make discoveries" is true??? Also this is a VERY tired trope in Hacker News. Please stop doing this. Here's the gist: A human can show that 50 people are dying of cancer because they were recently exposed to toxic sludge. An AI can't say a bunch of people were exposed to toxic sludge - it can only raise your prediction of getting cancer because you live near such and such coordinates (the coordinates where toxic sludge exist - but that's not visible to the AI)

BobbyJo 4y ago
He was making a counter argument. Parent used all the same logic to posit 'ai don't make discoveries'. If those are reasons ai don't make discoveries, and they all apply to humans as well, then it must be that humans also don't make discoveries. This is obviously false, which refutes the parent's point.
- coding123 4y ago
  Multiple places to refute the core logic: The asteroid has to be checked by a human (or AI) part is incorrect because a computer AI that's checking just images or data can't (yet) call a team of astronomers to focus telescopes somewhere and double check it. That part would almost nearly require general AI. Yes, someone could write a single-use software that tells a bunch of astronomers to check something that AI has found, but that's NOT "the AI" doing that. Humans don't have "training data" they have something else. I don't think "training data" and that "something else" is the same (yet).
  - albertzeyer 4y ago
    You would also not trust the result of a single human on the asteroid but it would be double checked by someone else. That's the point. What do humans get instead of training data? What do you mean by "something else", and why can't some artificial neural network (ANN) not have the same? Maybe you mean it does not get supervised labeled data? But unsupervised data is also just training data, and in fact ANNs are very successful in also using such unsupervised training data. So I really do not see the distinction between AI and human intelligence. And the argument why an AI can't make a discovery and a human can.
    - coding123 4y ago
      If I were to call information we use (as humans) to become an adult "training data" it would be seeing the world, eating baby food, getting spanked, falling in love, etc... is, in my opinion, something else. It's not training data. It's a completely different kind of conditioning. I think for us to call "training data" and the complete social evolution of a single human mind the same thing is ridiculous - AT THIS TIME. I'm not saying NNs (or some future AI tech) is NOT capable of reaching this status - but that's General AI. I haven't been reached out by OpenAI 5 in Gmail saying hey do you want to play a game of Dota 2 with me? It hasn't called me on the phone wanting to hang out. It's completely different. When those things happen we can talk but the original poster and myself are predicating this on "CURRENT AI" not theoretical AI.
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    So, you think AI can't make discoveries because it can't take initiative?
    - coding123 4y ago
      I think it's absolutely helpful in making it so that researchers can make discoveries by using AI.
JoshCole 4y ago
His point is built atop a tradition going back at least as far as ancient Greece to the formal discovery of what we call logic. In these times it was discovered that you could separate the contents of an argument from the argument itself and reason about the logical structure of the argument independent of what was being talked about. A technique called "refutation by substitution" came out of this thinking. If you take an argument structure, boil it down to its essential point, than rewrite the argument with different symbols you know more about you can very easily check whether the structure is valid. What you did, when you pointed out that his obviously wrong conclusion was wrong and asked him to defend it in order to be proved right is called a straw man. His point was that the conclusion was wrong and so insisting he defend it makes it very clear that you have poor comprehension of the logical tradition in which his comment is rooted.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  The notable difference being this is not ancient Greece and the two commenters above are not Socrates and a Sophist opponet, say. Also, you're jumping to conclusions. The OP did something that is indeed very common on HN. You concluded that what they did was based on an ancient tradition of logic. Quite a big jump there.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    > The notable difference being this is not ancient Greece and the two commenters above are not Socrates and a Sophist opponet, say. Who cares if they aren't people from ancient Greece? I said it was a tradition rooted in logic, not that they were from Greece. As educated people in the modern world, we are taught about logic. You should know this better than most; a lot better, actually. Which goes to show how reasonable it is that people on this forum would be expected to understand points rooted in logic. That said, it is Aristotle you ought to have referenced, "Aristotle sets the stage for all later theories of analogical reasoning. In his theoretical reflections on analogy and in his most judicious examples, we find a sober account that lays the foundation both for the commonsense guidelines noted above and for more sophisticated analyses." [1] "Aristotle proves invalidity by constructing counterexamples. This is very much in the spirit of modern logical theory: all that it takes to show that a certain form is invalid is a single instance of that form with true premises and a false conclusion. However, Aristotle states his results not by saying that certain premise-conclusion combinations are invalid but by saying that certain premise pairs do not “syllogize”: that is, that, given the pair in question, examples can be constructed in which premises of that form are true and a conclusion of any of the four possible forms is false." [2] > Also, you're jumping to conclusions. The alternative conclusion is that the person is too stupid to realize that obviously false claims are false, but simultaneously believes that making false claims with bad logic will mean that when they say "you get my point" they will be found to be convincing. That is an extremely implausible conclusion. It seems to me that the way to get to that conclusion is to dismiss people with prejudice on the basis of "I logic, they rhetoric" and to me at least that seems against the spirit of the Hacker News guidelines. So I don't think I made a big leap. I think I chose to assume good faith. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/ [2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DisCouTer https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DisCouTe...

BobbyJo 4y ago

He was making a counter argument. Parent used all the same logic to posit 'ai don't make discoveries'. If those are reasons ai don't make discoveries, and they all apply to humans as well, then it must be that humans also don't make discoveries. This is obviously false, which refutes the parent's point.

coding123 4y ago
Multiple places to refute the core logic: The asteroid has to be checked by a human (or AI) part is incorrect because a computer AI that's checking just images or data can't (yet) call a team of astronomers to focus telescopes somewhere and double check it. That part would almost nearly require general AI. Yes, someone could write a single-use software that tells a bunch of astronomers to check something that AI has found, but that's NOT "the AI" doing that. Humans don't have "training data" they have something else. I don't think "training data" and that "something else" is the same (yet).
- albertzeyer 4y ago
  You would also not trust the result of a single human on the asteroid but it would be double checked by someone else. That's the point. What do humans get instead of training data? What do you mean by "something else", and why can't some artificial neural network (ANN) not have the same? Maybe you mean it does not get supervised labeled data? But unsupervised data is also just training data, and in fact ANNs are very successful in also using such unsupervised training data. So I really do not see the distinction between AI and human intelligence. And the argument why an AI can't make a discovery and a human can.
  - coding123 4y ago
    If I were to call information we use (as humans) to become an adult "training data" it would be seeing the world, eating baby food, getting spanked, falling in love, etc... is, in my opinion, something else. It's not training data. It's a completely different kind of conditioning. I think for us to call "training data" and the complete social evolution of a single human mind the same thing is ridiculous - AT THIS TIME. I'm not saying NNs (or some future AI tech) is NOT capable of reaching this status - but that's General AI. I haven't been reached out by OpenAI 5 in Gmail saying hey do you want to play a game of Dota 2 with me? It hasn't called me on the phone wanting to hang out. It's completely different. When those things happen we can talk but the original poster and myself are predicating this on "CURRENT AI" not theoretical AI.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  So, you think AI can't make discoveries because it can't take initiative?
  - coding123 4y ago
    I think it's absolutely helpful in making it so that researchers can make discoveries by using AI.

JoshCole 4y ago

His point is built atop a tradition going back at least as far as ancient Greece to the formal discovery of what we call logic. In these times it was discovered that you could separate the contents of an argument from the argument itself and reason about the logical structure of the argument independent of what was being talked about. A technique called "refutation by substitution" came out of this thinking. If you take an argument structure, boil it down to its essential point, than rewrite the argument with different symbols you know more about you can very easily check whether the structure is valid. What you did, when you pointed out that his obviously wrong conclusion was wrong and asked him to defend it in order to be proved right is called a straw man. His point was that the conclusion was wrong and so insisting he defend it makes it very clear that you have poor comprehension of the logical tradition in which his comment is rooted.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
The notable difference being this is not ancient Greece and the two commenters above are not Socrates and a Sophist opponet, say. Also, you're jumping to conclusions. The OP did something that is indeed very common on HN. You concluded that what they did was based on an ancient tradition of logic. Quite a big jump there.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  > The notable difference being this is not ancient Greece and the two commenters above are not Socrates and a Sophist opponet, say. Who cares if they aren't people from ancient Greece? I said it was a tradition rooted in logic, not that they were from Greece. As educated people in the modern world, we are taught about logic. You should know this better than most; a lot better, actually. Which goes to show how reasonable it is that people on this forum would be expected to understand points rooted in logic. That said, it is Aristotle you ought to have referenced, "Aristotle sets the stage for all later theories of analogical reasoning. In his theoretical reflections on analogy and in his most judicious examples, we find a sober account that lays the foundation both for the commonsense guidelines noted above and for more sophisticated analyses." [1] "Aristotle proves invalidity by constructing counterexamples. This is very much in the spirit of modern logical theory: all that it takes to show that a certain form is invalid is a single instance of that form with true premises and a false conclusion. However, Aristotle states his results not by saying that certain premise-conclusion combinations are invalid but by saying that certain premise pairs do not “syllogize”: that is, that, given the pair in question, examples can be constructed in which premises of that form are true and a conclusion of any of the four possible forms is false." [2] > Also, you're jumping to conclusions. The alternative conclusion is that the person is too stupid to realize that obviously false claims are false, but simultaneously believes that making false claims with bad logic will mean that when they say "you get my point" they will be found to be convincing. That is an extremely implausible conclusion. It seems to me that the way to get to that conclusion is to dismiss people with prejudice on the basis of "I logic, they rhetoric" and to me at least that seems against the spirit of the Hacker News guidelines. So I don't think I made a big leap. I think I chose to assume good faith. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/ [2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DisCouTer https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/#DisCouTe...