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Generally, people in HN don't let that small detail get in the way of making strong assertions on these matters. These threads are always massive, embarrassing

Generally, people in HN don't let that small detail get in the way of making strong assertions on these matters. These threads are always massive, embarrassing trainwrecks of naive takes on cognition and consciousness. It's like HN just woke up and refuses to acknowledge the relevance of the extensive prior literature on these subjects. Instead, people seem mostly fine with making shit up. Embarrassing.

sho_hn 3y ago
> Embarrassing. It's fine. We're social animals, we discuss topics even if we lack perfect expertise, at our present level of understanding. I've certainly had, for example, many opinions on programming that were later superseded by deeper understanding or evolving priorities. It's just important to remember there's probably a bigger and better expert out there, and stay humble and interested, and let yourself be corrected.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Yes, true, however, what I find egregious in this case is the comparative lack of standards. Among the other technical and scientific topics often discussed here, there is a basic general expectation of grounded reference to existing research and bodies of knowledge. Deviations from this standard are usually met with corrections. With the topic of cognition and consciousness, this is not so (generally). The standard is to absolutely not reference existing research and to basically pretend it doesn't exist. Instead, the vacuum of ignorance is filled with whatever comes to mind and threads engage in freeform speculation. This is also ironic since these topics are usually about how LLMs don't understand and just fill the vacuum of its ignorance with whatever happens to be next on the statistical chain, regardless of veracity.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    I think it's because a lot of people presume the topic at hand to be relatively novel and not have a significant body of work behind it. At to some extent this is because they have been told this is the case - even by experts or their reporters. With physics, for example, people have an understanding that there's a large existing body of work, and that physics has been remarkably successful at building on earlier knowledge for decades without having to debunk a lot of earlier results. It's a familiar story. With AI, however, the popular narrative is that earlier approaches to the problem were all laughing stocks that went nowhere. There's not a good sense for how old some the ideas that work now actually are, and how many of the older theoretical and thought frameworks are still perfectly valid, in particular at the interfaces toward other branches of science and engineering. There's some more nuanced and balanced primers on the topic (e.g. the Wooldridge book), but an awful lot more writing on AI Winters and what not. This snowballs into a lack of awareness of the overlap between "AI" and, say, the body of knowledge in statistics. In other words: Sure, I agree - HN collectively is less knowledge on this than on some other topics (myself included!), and it's worth taking stock of that, I suppose.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Generally, people in HN These silly generalisations about HN are pointless. HN has a pretty diverse set of worldviews, approaches, and levels of expertise across a range of topics. There is zero point in lumping people into a single, or even a majority, behaviour.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Yeah, disagree. I read most threads on these topics, and although I can't characterize people that don't post, I can certainly attest to the generality I'm pointing out. I haven't seen any discussions that defy it. They may exist, but they are atypical. The idea that generalities can't be true or useful is pretty insidious, since it prevents reasoning about groups.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > The idea that generalities can't be true or useful is pretty insidious This idea was not mentioned, whether or not you attest that it was.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
Hang on. I've watched these trainwrecks for a while. The people who usually don't let details get in their way are the ones who claim that LLMs think even though these same people can't explain what thinking means. The onus [1] should go the other way. ____________ [1] Today's conversation-derailing trivium: "onus" means ass in Greek. As in donkey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager
- ryanklee 3y ago
  It happens on both sides in equal measure.
- smokel 3y ago
  I'm happy to be on the agnostic front. A colleague at my first job was working on some software that wrapped around other software, and he dubbed it "Burrito". When his project turned out not to be as useful as expected, he was pleasantly surprised that he could also use the original meaning of the word burrito, being "little donkey" in Spanish [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    :)
smokel 3y ago
It is unfortunate that HN is not very well suited for long-running discussions. A topic mostly dies out after about a day or less. Early reactions seem to score more karma, and that probably spurs people into writing hasty replies. To most, it is not worth it to perform a couple of hours of research before writing up a good reply. This means we have to be lucky to have some expert with current knowledge join in. Given that most people here are billionaires with a passion for dynamic typing, and not philosophers of mind, I am actually fairly surprised at the reasonable level of discussion. Also, I doubt that referencing prior literature in the context of cognition and consciousness would be of much help. HN writes a lot of nonsense about it, but so have many professional philosophers. After sifting through all of that, one still has to add a lot of convincing arguments to advance an unpopular opinion. A friend once suggested to build forum software that would allow discussions to reach a certain level of trustworthiness or truth. After several lengthy discussions I still doubt that such a thing is feasible. But it might spark your interest? :)
maxdoop 3y ago
And generally, people like yourself make opposite claims with equally no backing. What does it mean to understand something? To think? How is a human any different than predicting the next “thing” given a series of inputs?
- ryanklee 3y ago
  I didn't make any claim other than that threads on this topic systematically disregard existing knowledge and research. And also, that I don't think it's justified.
bondarchuk 3y ago
Can you name some prior work that you think should be required reading here? I honestly don't think there's much if anything in the philosophy of consciousness that would be worth it. But maybe in cognition, not very familiar with it.

sho_hn 3y ago

> Embarrassing. It's fine. We're social animals, we discuss topics even if we lack perfect expertise, at our present level of understanding. I've certainly had, for example, many opinions on programming that were later superseded by deeper understanding or evolving priorities. It's just important to remember there's probably a bigger and better expert out there, and stay humble and interested, and let yourself be corrected.

ryanklee 3y ago
Yes, true, however, what I find egregious in this case is the comparative lack of standards. Among the other technical and scientific topics often discussed here, there is a basic general expectation of grounded reference to existing research and bodies of knowledge. Deviations from this standard are usually met with corrections. With the topic of cognition and consciousness, this is not so (generally). The standard is to absolutely not reference existing research and to basically pretend it doesn't exist. Instead, the vacuum of ignorance is filled with whatever comes to mind and threads engage in freeform speculation. This is also ironic since these topics are usually about how LLMs don't understand and just fill the vacuum of its ignorance with whatever happens to be next on the statistical chain, regardless of veracity.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  I think it's because a lot of people presume the topic at hand to be relatively novel and not have a significant body of work behind it. At to some extent this is because they have been told this is the case - even by experts or their reporters. With physics, for example, people have an understanding that there's a large existing body of work, and that physics has been remarkably successful at building on earlier knowledge for decades without having to debunk a lot of earlier results. It's a familiar story. With AI, however, the popular narrative is that earlier approaches to the problem were all laughing stocks that went nowhere. There's not a good sense for how old some the ideas that work now actually are, and how many of the older theoretical and thought frameworks are still perfectly valid, in particular at the interfaces toward other branches of science and engineering. There's some more nuanced and balanced primers on the topic (e.g. the Wooldridge book), but an awful lot more writing on AI Winters and what not. This snowballs into a lack of awareness of the overlap between "AI" and, say, the body of knowledge in statistics. In other words: Sure, I agree - HN collectively is less knowledge on this than on some other topics (myself included!), and it's worth taking stock of that, I suppose.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Generally, people in HN These silly generalisations about HN are pointless. HN has a pretty diverse set of worldviews, approaches, and levels of expertise across a range of topics. There is zero point in lumping people into a single, or even a majority, behaviour.

ryanklee 3y ago
Yeah, disagree. I read most threads on these topics, and although I can't characterize people that don't post, I can certainly attest to the generality I'm pointing out. I haven't seen any discussions that defy it. They may exist, but they are atypical. The idea that generalities can't be true or useful is pretty insidious, since it prevents reasoning about groups.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The idea that generalities can't be true or useful is pretty insidious This idea was not mentioned, whether or not you attest that it was.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

Hang on. I've watched these trainwrecks for a while. The people who usually don't let details get in their way are the ones who claim that LLMs think even though these same people can't explain what thinking means. The onus [1] should go the other way. ____________ [1] Today's conversation-derailing trivium: "onus" means ass in Greek. As in donkey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager

ryanklee 3y ago
It happens on both sides in equal measure.
smokel 3y ago
I'm happy to be on the agnostic front. A colleague at my first job was working on some software that wrapped around other software, and he dubbed it "Burrito". When his project turned out not to be as useful as expected, he was pleasantly surprised that he could also use the original meaning of the word burrito, being "little donkey" in Spanish [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  :)

smokel 3y ago

It is unfortunate that HN is not very well suited for long-running discussions. A topic mostly dies out after about a day or less. Early reactions seem to score more karma, and that probably spurs people into writing hasty replies. To most, it is not worth it to perform a couple of hours of research before writing up a good reply. This means we have to be lucky to have some expert with current knowledge join in. Given that most people here are billionaires with a passion for dynamic typing, and not philosophers of mind, I am actually fairly surprised at the reasonable level of discussion. Also, I doubt that referencing prior literature in the context of cognition and consciousness would be of much help. HN writes a lot of nonsense about it, but so have many professional philosophers. After sifting through all of that, one still has to add a lot of convincing arguments to advance an unpopular opinion. A friend once suggested to build forum software that would allow discussions to reach a certain level of trustworthiness or truth. After several lengthy discussions I still doubt that such a thing is feasible. But it might spark your interest? :)

maxdoop 3y ago

And generally, people like yourself make opposite claims with equally no backing. What does it mean to understand something? To think? How is a human any different than predicting the next “thing” given a series of inputs?

ryanklee 3y ago
I didn't make any claim other than that threads on this topic systematically disregard existing knowledge and research. And also, that I don't think it's justified.

bondarchuk 3y ago

Can you name some prior work that you think should be required reading here? I honestly don't think there's much if anything in the philosophy of consciousness that would be worth it. But maybe in cognition, not very familiar with it.