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Following your logic, the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure rando

by 2024throwaway 3y ago

Following your logic, the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet. Edit since I can't reply: "I don't like your answer, therefore you aren't engaging in good faith." lol

doctoboggan 3y ago
I am aware of the thought experiment you are referring to, but if I witnessed a group of monkeys write the full works of Shakespeare in my lifetime then yes, I would actually consider it something worthy of investigating. However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith... What if this "categorize and ignore/forget" is causing humans to miss something extremely important in their midst? Bad faith is certainly possible here, but also possible is that this person genuinely believes what they say.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  > However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you. From my perspective, it seems pretty clear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. People are allowed to disagree with you. This person presented a thoughtful critique of your argument. It made plenty of sense to me.
two_in_one 3y ago
> the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet The funny thing 'yes'. Million monkeys cannot do it by randomly typing. They cannot even randomly type at all. Each monkey is intelligent creature, they will follow some patterns. If they did manage to produce Shakspeare they definitely understood something. Today it's easy to programmatically simulate 1m monkeys typing randomly 10 keys per second. Try it ;)
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  Then it's the thought experiment that needs re-framing. I'll give it a shot: At nearly every point in the universe, there is a noise: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. What if you listened to the CMBR at a specific point in space, converted that signal into Unicode text, and it just happened to write Romeo and Juliet? Is that intelligence? No. That's selection bias. So why is ChatGPT able to quote Shakespeare when asked? Because the entire text of the play is in its training corpus, and the infinite permutations of nonsensical CMBR noise is not.

doctoboggan 3y ago

I am aware of the thought experiment you are referring to, but if I witnessed a group of monkeys write the full works of Shakespeare in my lifetime then yes, I would actually consider it something worthy of investigating. However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you.

mistermann 3y ago
> However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith... What if this "categorize and ignore/forget" is causing humans to miss something extremely important in their midst? Bad faith is certainly possible here, but also possible is that this person genuinely believes what they say.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
> However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you. From my perspective, it seems pretty clear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. People are allowed to disagree with you. This person presented a thoughtful critique of your argument. It made plenty of sense to me.

two_in_one 3y ago

> the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet The funny thing 'yes'. Million monkeys cannot do it by randomly typing. They cannot even randomly type at all. Each monkey is intelligent creature, they will follow some patterns. If they did manage to produce Shakspeare they definitely understood something. Today it's easy to programmatically simulate 1m monkeys typing randomly 10 keys per second. Try it ;)

thomastjeffery 3y ago
Then it's the thought experiment that needs re-framing. I'll give it a shot: At nearly every point in the universe, there is a noise: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. What if you listened to the CMBR at a specific point in space, converted that signal into Unicode text, and it just happened to write Romeo and Juliet? Is that intelligence? No. That's selection bias. So why is ChatGPT able to quote Shakespeare when asked? Because the entire text of the play is in its training corpus, and the infinite permutations of nonsensical CMBR noise is not.