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The reason humans do this and LLMs is very different. Humans do it as a social skill / tribe fitting behaviour. Agreeableness. (watch out for that!)

naasking 3y ago
> The reason humans do this and LLMs is very different. Humans do it as a social skill / tribe fitting behaviour. Tribe fitting doesn't sound as far off from minimizing loss functions as you imply.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
  I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. They do not choose to obey the requirements of a loss function; it is simply how they work, like any machine. Humans do not work this way, and the difference is fundamental.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process". Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood. > LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
    - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
      > Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? Because the only thing an LLM does is apply statistics to inputs to generate outputs. That's literally it. It's just a pile of statistics. To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. LLMs do not have cognitive processes, while humans do, so the analogy obviously requires making some kind of leap between the two if it is to have any merit whatsoever. My request lines up with this: if LLMs are "not so different" from humans, and if LLMs work only based on statistics, then this requires humans also work only based on statistics. I want to see evidence of this. > You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have. Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? And therefore we can't know how they work, so we get to just make up wild claims about their capabilities, and then smarmily position ourselves as some kind of authority on the matter when other people talk about how they work? No, I don't think so. We do know how LLMs work, and the way they work is not thinking. They have no agency. Claims to the contrary are, frankly, absolutely absurd. They're just statistics. There's nothing magical about them. You should stop pretending there is.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        > Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? No, he's suggesting that the code behind the human brain is "ineffable or something". For all we know, human brains might be "just statistics", "nothing magical about them". You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is.
        amazingman 3y ago
        By that standard we have no way of knowing whether rocks think, either.
        bheadmaster 3y ago
MVissers 3y ago
Humans do this unconsciously as well. You have some extreme medical conditions like confabulation where people just make up the strangest things. Split-brain personality people can make up stories when you prompted the other brain, and the current half has to explain why it did something. I'm baffled also that reverse psychology even works on LLMs, to bypass some of its safeties. I mean.. We're using psychological tricks that work on toddlers and also work on these models. I'm an amateur neuroscientist as you can see, but find LLMs fascinating.
vidarh 3y ago
Is it? To my knowledge we don't have reliable data on why humans do this. To me it appears as if we spend a significant amount of our time retroactively making up justifications for things even to ourselves for things there's little reason to think we've done based on a conscious decision making at all.

naasking 3y ago

> The reason humans do this and LLMs is very different. Humans do it as a social skill / tribe fitting behaviour. Tribe fitting doesn't sound as far off from minimizing loss functions as you imply.

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. They do not choose to obey the requirements of a loss function; it is simply how they work, like any machine. Humans do not work this way, and the difference is fundamental.
- naasking 3y ago
  > I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process". Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood. > LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
  - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
    > Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? Because the only thing an LLM does is apply statistics to inputs to generate outputs. That's literally it. It's just a pile of statistics. To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. LLMs do not have cognitive processes, while humans do, so the analogy obviously requires making some kind of leap between the two if it is to have any merit whatsoever. My request lines up with this: if LLMs are "not so different" from humans, and if LLMs work only based on statistics, then this requires humans also work only based on statistics. I want to see evidence of this. > You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have. Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? And therefore we can't know how they work, so we get to just make up wild claims about their capabilities, and then smarmily position ourselves as some kind of authority on the matter when other people talk about how they work? No, I don't think so. We do know how LLMs work, and the way they work is not thinking. They have no agency. Claims to the contrary are, frankly, absolutely absurd. They're just statistics. There's nothing magical about them. You should stop pretending there is.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      > Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? No, he's suggesting that the code behind the human brain is "ineffable or something". For all we know, human brains might be "just statistics", "nothing magical about them". You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is.
      - amazingman 3y ago
        By that standard we have no way of knowing whether rocks think, either.
        bheadmaster 3y ago

MVissers 3y ago

Humans do this unconsciously as well. You have some extreme medical conditions like confabulation where people just make up the strangest things. Split-brain personality people can make up stories when you prompted the other brain, and the current half has to explain why it did something. I'm baffled also that reverse psychology even works on LLMs, to bypass some of its safeties. I mean.. We're using psychological tricks that work on toddlers and also work on these models. I'm an amateur neuroscientist as you can see, but find LLMs fascinating.

vidarh 3y ago

Is it? To my knowledge we don't have reliable data on why humans do this. To me it appears as if we spend a significant amount of our time retroactively making up justifications for things even to ourselves for things there's little reason to think we've done based on a conscious decision making at all.