2 ms·

> just surrender to it all, believe in all the machine tells you unquestionably, forget the fact checking, it feels good to be ignorant... it will be fine... I

> just surrender to it all, believe in all the machine tells you unquestionably, forget the fact checking, it feels good to be ignorant... it will be fine... It's the same issue with Google Search, any web page, or, heck, any book. Fact checking gets you only so far. You need critical thinking. It's okay to "learn" wrong facts from time to time as long as you are willing to be critical and throw the ideas away if they turn out to be wrong. I think this Popperian view is much more useful than living with the idea that you can only accept information that is provably true. Life is too short to verify every fact. Most things outside programming are not even verifiable anyway. By the time that Steve Jobs would have "verified" that the iPhone was certainly a good idea to pursue, Apple might have been bankrupt. Or in the old days, by the time you have verified that there is a tiger in the bush, it has already eaten you.

cmiles74 3y ago
There's a lot of truth in this comment and a lot that I wholeheartedly agree with. When I spend time on something that turns out to be incorrect, I would prefer it to be because of choice I made instead of some random choice made by an LLM. Maybe the author is someone I'm interested in, maybe there's value in understanding other sides of the issue, etc. When I learn something erroneous from an LLM, all I know is that the LLM told me.
DharmaPolice 3y ago
The issue is far more serious with ChatGPT/similar models because things that are laughably untrue are delivered exactly the same as something that's solidly true. When doing a normal search I can make some assessment on the quality of the source and the likelihood the source is wrong. People should be able "throw the ideas away if they turn out to be wrong" but the problem is these ideas unconsciously or not help build your model of the world. Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world.
- huijzer 3y ago
  > Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world. Intuitively, I would think the same, but a book about education research that I read and my own experience taught me that new information is surprisingly easy to unlearn. It’s probably because new information sits at the edges of your neural networks and do not yet provide a foundation for other knowledge. This will only happen if the knowledge stands the test of time (which is exactly how it should be according to Popper). If a counterexample is found, then the information can easily be discarded since it’s not foundational anyway and the brain learns the counterexample too (the brain is very good in remembering surprising things).
  - DharmaPolice 3y ago
    That presumes the wrong information is corrected quickly. What about the cases when that doesn't happen? Aren't you often finding out things you thought were true from years ago are wrong?
    - PoignardAzur 3y ago
      You weigh new information by how confident you are in it. You try to check different sources, you maintain an open-mind, etc. In that, ChatGPT is just an additional low-reliability source of information.

cmiles74 3y ago

There's a lot of truth in this comment and a lot that I wholeheartedly agree with. When I spend time on something that turns out to be incorrect, I would prefer it to be because of choice I made instead of some random choice made by an LLM. Maybe the author is someone I'm interested in, maybe there's value in understanding other sides of the issue, etc. When I learn something erroneous from an LLM, all I know is that the LLM told me.

DharmaPolice 3y ago

The issue is far more serious with ChatGPT/similar models because things that are laughably untrue are delivered exactly the same as something that's solidly true. When doing a normal search I can make some assessment on the quality of the source and the likelihood the source is wrong. People should be able "throw the ideas away if they turn out to be wrong" but the problem is these ideas unconsciously or not help build your model of the world. Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world.

huijzer 3y ago
> Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world. Intuitively, I would think the same, but a book about education research that I read and my own experience taught me that new information is surprisingly easy to unlearn. It’s probably because new information sits at the edges of your neural networks and do not yet provide a foundation for other knowledge. This will only happen if the knowledge stands the test of time (which is exactly how it should be according to Popper). If a counterexample is found, then the information can easily be discarded since it’s not foundational anyway and the brain learns the counterexample too (the brain is very good in remembering surprising things).
- DharmaPolice 3y ago
  That presumes the wrong information is corrected quickly. What about the cases when that doesn't happen? Aren't you often finding out things you thought were true from years ago are wrong?
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    You weigh new information by how confident you are in it. You try to check different sources, you maintain an open-mind, etc. In that, ChatGPT is just an additional low-reliability source of information.