5 ms·

how is OpenAI supposed to handle difficult and uncomfortable statistics?

by sendfoods 4y ago

klipt 4y ago
Respond with the full text of The Mismeasure of Man, perhaps?
- pannSun 4y ago
  That book has been largely debunked [1], and mostly concerned itself with science that was outdated even at the time of its publication. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
  - runarberg 4y ago
    That link is behind a paywall. Can you give a tl;dr of how this book has been debunked? Or more specifically how it doesn’t put the question of IQ difference between racial groups into perspective. As far as I’m aware this book was released in the 80s over a decade before The Bell Curve was released, the latter cited research dated after the release of the former, which Mismeasure was very much concerned with. Are you maybe thinking about the brain weight research that Mismeasure is talking about in the early chapters? If so, those were there only to provide a historical perspective. I can assume most readers already knew those research were well outdated before publication (and Gould even says so in the book).
yrgulation 4y ago
good question - how can it handle answers about countries founded on genocide, slavery, systemic racism, and their impact on affected people’s lives across centuries. can it correlate iq with these?
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  For difficult topics, just say that the filter prohibits this etc
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Obviously they should teach it the deep and complex history of institutionalized racism through, slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, red lining, and the prison industrial complex that has led to a massive wealth and education gap. But low key that would also scare the average middle class American too hard, so probably better off to just do intense internal censors to avoid difficult thoughts
- lzaaz 4y ago
  How does that correlate with an average, current IQ of 85?
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Damn. You aren't really supposed to say the quiet part out loud fam, I feel like "race realism" is pretty frowned upon in almost every social setting outside of very smelly people... Obviously having generations of people put into bad schools and not be provided opportunities to have "good jobs" will lead to you not being able to take an IQ test well. IQ tests basically just examine how much analytical reasoning you learned in K-12. Like, any gray haired black person in America will remember having actual Jim Crow laws persecute them and it was literally legal to discriminate people for housing in America until 1977. It will take a massive amount of time to heal those social wounds that were inflicted on our fellow humans.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomp 4y ago
      > IQ tests basically just examine how much analytical reasoning you learned in K-12. Actually IQ is highly genetic, and the amount it’s inherited actually goes up as one ages (meaning that while education and upbringing can influence IQ temporarily, genetics eventually dominates). Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf
eternalban 4y ago
We will likely see a moderation system ala karma granting more access based on some social measure of 'responsibility'. In other words, OpenAI can bake in user assessment (which they may already have) and speak according to the perceived level of the user, which may be a simple static tiered system mapping to the assessment of user made by the AI itself. [Consider how e.g. a hot geopolitical topic is discussed in wonk journals vs what is "fit to print" for the uninitiated. The former are always far more nuanced.] p.s. i.e. there will be an ever present 'dang' AI watching over the conversation - the AI moderator. This can instruct the answering AI to set the user-level discourse setting.
- apostacy 4y ago
  That is honestly horrifying. People will just "go undercover" and impersonate a more 'educated' person and convince the AI to be honest about uncomfortable facts. Perhaps they will get another AI to do it for them. If your reality is such a minefield of dissonance that it needs to be patched this much, then that is very much a failure on your part.
runarberg 4y ago
A human would answer this by talking about the history of intelligence testing, the relevant biases, how factor analysis plays a role and how easy it is to manipulate outcomes in factor analysis if you feed your model with biased data. Question whether IQ scores are an accurate measure of intelligence, and whether intelligence can at all be defined as a single metric, and what use it has doing so. Then with all that caveats and biases in mind simply answer the question. In modern psychology difference in IQ among racial group is only difficult and uncomfortable statistics because it demonstrates years of scientific racism that thrived inside the field.
nemothekid 4y ago
>OpenAI supposed to handle difficult and uncomfortable statistics? I think the framing of this question is wrong, and is a limitation of the system that I've only really seen Sam Altman point out. These "difficult and uncomfortable statistics" aren't accurate or well-researched but if you built an LLM on an open dataset you would find the people asking these questions have an agenda and on average will always lead to a certain kind of answer. The AI doesn't "understand" the question, it's just drawing from an incredibly large bank of "average answers". What do you expect the AI to answer with when you give it a loaded question that only really asked on a site like "stormfront.com"? I don't think this is the only area ChatGPT will fail, but I imagine there will be a layer of prompt engineering where you can get the AI to give you what you want by phrasing your question a certain way. To try and pass off these results as objective is just wrong given the propensity for ChatGPT to be confidently wrong.
- pannSun 4y ago
  > What do you expect the AI to answer with when you give it a loaded question that only really asked on a site like "stormfront.com"? Are such questions asked only on stormfront? The wiki article [1] cites quite a few studies on the subject, including by the APA. On the other hand, supposing that were true, and only stormfront and its ilk asked such questions. How can then respectable supposed experts claim we are all the same, if they didn't even check? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_scores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_sco...
  - ineptech 4y ago
    Honest answer since you seem new to this debate: there are tons of studies about IQ and race, most of them are heavily disputed, researching them is difficult because the field is so controversial, they're difficult to compare because there are so many different ways to define and measure "race" and "IQ", and the whole topic is so famously toxic and vitriolic that it tends to be a de facto banned topic on most fora, including this one.
    - apostacy 4y ago
apostacy 4y ago
Your discomfort is your own fault. This is like saying that scales should not tell you that you have gained weight, because it makes you uncomfortable. You should simply have a better relationship with reality, and then you wouldn't feel so much cogntive dissonance. IQ is highly correlated with all sorts of measurable differences that are also highly correlated to race, such as school district, family structure, and even diet. IQ is essentially a proxy for other things. Shame on you for making racist assumptions that black people are inferior. That just means that you need to reckon with your own racist assumptions, and stop imposing your cognitive dissonance on us. If we can't have an honest conversation, then we can't hope to improve things.

how is OpenAI supposed to handle difficult and uncomfortable statistics?

klipt 4y ago

Respond with the full text of The Mismeasure of Man, perhaps?

pannSun 4y ago
That book has been largely debunked [1], and mostly concerned itself with science that was outdated even at the time of its publication. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
- runarberg 4y ago
  That link is behind a paywall. Can you give a tl;dr of how this book has been debunked? Or more specifically how it doesn’t put the question of IQ difference between racial groups into perspective. As far as I’m aware this book was released in the 80s over a decade before The Bell Curve was released, the latter cited research dated after the release of the former, which Mismeasure was very much concerned with. Are you maybe thinking about the brain weight research that Mismeasure is talking about in the early chapters? If so, those were there only to provide a historical perspective. I can assume most readers already knew those research were well outdated before publication (and Gould even says so in the book).

yrgulation 4y ago

good question - how can it handle answers about countries founded on genocide, slavery, systemic racism, and their impact on affected people’s lives across centuries. can it correlate iq with these?

cuteboy19 4y ago
For difficult topics, just say that the filter prohibits this etc

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

Obviously they should teach it the deep and complex history of institutionalized racism through, slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, red lining, and the prison industrial complex that has led to a massive wealth and education gap. But low key that would also scare the average middle class American too hard, so probably better off to just do intense internal censors to avoid difficult thoughts

lzaaz 4y ago
How does that correlate with an average, current IQ of 85?
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Damn. You aren't really supposed to say the quiet part out loud fam, I feel like "race realism" is pretty frowned upon in almost every social setting outside of very smelly people... Obviously having generations of people put into bad schools and not be provided opportunities to have "good jobs" will lead to you not being able to take an IQ test well. IQ tests basically just examine how much analytical reasoning you learned in K-12. Like, any gray haired black person in America will remember having actual Jim Crow laws persecute them and it was literally legal to discriminate people for housing in America until 1977. It will take a massive amount of time to heal those social wounds that were inflicted on our fellow humans.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomp 4y ago
    > IQ tests basically just examine how much analytical reasoning you learned in K-12. Actually IQ is highly genetic, and the amount it’s inherited actually goes up as one ages (meaning that while education and upbringing can influence IQ temporarily, genetics eventually dominates). Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf

eternalban 4y ago

We will likely see a moderation system ala karma granting more access based on some social measure of 'responsibility'. In other words, OpenAI can bake in user assessment (which they may already have) and speak according to the perceived level of the user, which may be a simple static tiered system mapping to the assessment of user made by the AI itself. [Consider how e.g. a hot geopolitical topic is discussed in wonk journals vs what is "fit to print" for the uninitiated. The former are always far more nuanced.] p.s. i.e. there will be an ever present 'dang' AI watching over the conversation - the AI moderator. This can instruct the answering AI to set the user-level discourse setting.

apostacy 4y ago
That is honestly horrifying. People will just "go undercover" and impersonate a more 'educated' person and convince the AI to be honest about uncomfortable facts. Perhaps they will get another AI to do it for them. If your reality is such a minefield of dissonance that it needs to be patched this much, then that is very much a failure on your part.

runarberg 4y ago

A human would answer this by talking about the history of intelligence testing, the relevant biases, how factor analysis plays a role and how easy it is to manipulate outcomes in factor analysis if you feed your model with biased data. Question whether IQ scores are an accurate measure of intelligence, and whether intelligence can at all be defined as a single metric, and what use it has doing so. Then with all that caveats and biases in mind simply answer the question. In modern psychology difference in IQ among racial group is only difficult and uncomfortable statistics because it demonstrates years of scientific racism that thrived inside the field.

nemothekid 4y ago

>OpenAI supposed to handle difficult and uncomfortable statistics? I think the framing of this question is wrong, and is a limitation of the system that I've only really seen Sam Altman point out. These "difficult and uncomfortable statistics" aren't accurate or well-researched but if you built an LLM on an open dataset you would find the people asking these questions have an agenda and on average will always lead to a certain kind of answer. The AI doesn't "understand" the question, it's just drawing from an incredibly large bank of "average answers". What do you expect the AI to answer with when you give it a loaded question that only really asked on a site like "stormfront.com"? I don't think this is the only area ChatGPT will fail, but I imagine there will be a layer of prompt engineering where you can get the AI to give you what you want by phrasing your question a certain way. To try and pass off these results as objective is just wrong given the propensity for ChatGPT to be confidently wrong.

pannSun 4y ago
> What do you expect the AI to answer with when you give it a loaded question that only really asked on a site like "stormfront.com"? Are such questions asked only on stormfront? The wiki article [1] cites quite a few studies on the subject, including by the APA. On the other hand, supposing that were true, and only stormfront and its ilk asked such questions. How can then respectable supposed experts claim we are all the same, if they didn't even check? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_scores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_sco...
- ineptech 4y ago
  Honest answer since you seem new to this debate: there are tons of studies about IQ and race, most of them are heavily disputed, researching them is difficult because the field is so controversial, they're difficult to compare because there are so many different ways to define and measure "race" and "IQ", and the whole topic is so famously toxic and vitriolic that it tends to be a de facto banned topic on most fora, including this one.
  - apostacy 4y ago

apostacy 4y ago

Your discomfort is your own fault. This is like saying that scales should not tell you that you have gained weight, because it makes you uncomfortable. You should simply have a better relationship with reality, and then you wouldn't feel so much cogntive dissonance. IQ is highly correlated with all sorts of measurable differences that are also highly correlated to race, such as school district, family structure, and even diet. IQ is essentially a proxy for other things. Shame on you for making racist assumptions that black people are inferior. That just means that you need to reckon with your own racist assumptions, and stop imposing your cognitive dissonance on us. If we can't have an honest conversation, then we can't hope to improve things.