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Looks more like science here. Run a bunch of experiments and see which does better. But literally the first sentence of the readme is "Prompt engineering is ki
by muzani 3y ago
Looks more like science here. Run a bunch of experiments and see which does better.
But literally the first sentence of the readme is "Prompt engineering is kind of like alchemy."
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoalchemy is kind of like science before a lot of principles were formalized.
- f1shy 3y agoThis comes to mind: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335
- namaria 3y ago> Run a bunch of experiments and see which does better. That's empiricism. Scientific method implies formulating falsifiable theoretical claims, producing meaningful analysis of experimental conditions, publishing peer-reviewed and reproducible results.
- judge2020 3y agoThat's if you're trying to become a scientist. You can do science even if your experiment doesn't contain any of those elements besides trying multiple things and observing the outcomes.
- namaria 3y agoSure, the same way I can practice medicine by putting leeches on people. I'm not trying to become a physician so it's alright to call that medicine.
- olddustytrail 3y agoWell, not you, but other people could because leeches are still used because they work. You're trying to correct people on a subject you know nothing about.
- Kerb_ 3y agoYou could take some classes and learn how and when to apply leeches and become a physician call it medicine too. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/leeches-still-used-modern-medicine# https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/leeches-...
- namaria 3y agoYes, because practicing Medicine is about a whole apparatus of agreed upon practices, not pick and choosing and slapping a label on it. Much like the case with doing Science, which is what I was getting at.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoAt this point you’re just deliberately making the definition of “science” ambiguous to conveniently support your point.
- judge2020 3y agoIs calling someone (or a fictional character) a "mad scientist" incorrect just because they don't follow every step of the scientific method?
- l33t233372 3y agoDoes the scientific method include peer review? I thought that was a recent phenomenon.
- namaria 3y agoPeer review has been a thing since, albeit in a much less rigorous way, at least the XVII century. The so-called 'republic of letters' was a world (europe) wide society of philosophers, mathematicians, and early experimenters sharing results and data in writing. Mathematicians have been publishing proofs and challenging each other in Europe since at least the Italian Risorgimento...
- l33t233372 3y agoDoes the fact that it’s old mean it’s part of the scientific method?
- namaria 3y agoThat fact that it's part of the scientific method makes it part of the scientific method. I was addressing the "is it recent" bit.
- bravura 3y agoThis is more engineering than science. For a given task, try a bunch of approaches and keep the best one. Science would be replicable, ie demonstrate that this particular approach to prompt writing yields better prompts than some baseline prompt writing approach across an array of different problems.
- kossTKR 3y agoThe difference is that in science the dialectic is between you the observer or a group of observers and a "reality" that hopefully(!) remains relatively stable, because the human organism is the way that it is - just as physical reality. But these models are changing literally every day, so there's no fixed thing to reveal. So no one will be able to reproduce anything at all. This makes all this "engineering" pretty ridiculous in my eyes, it's literally for one models bizarre emergent properties.